


Five and a Half Hours

by sap1066



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Romance, Sex, Sex in a TARDIS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2018-12-22 12:34:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 55,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11967504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sap1066/pseuds/sap1066
Summary: A Nine/Rose Girl in the Fireplace fix it. Romance. Sex. Choose your own adventure.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Read my novels The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer available on Amazon, Kobo and Nook.

Two hours was just swanning off. She was familiar with swanning off. He’d been halfway through swanning off the second time she met him, after all. Usually, about two hours was as long as he could last on his own before he got bored and wanted an audience again.   
  
Three hours was swanning off plus an excuse. Like, sorry Rose, I got captured by the Bee-People of Baksharat, or ‘a funny thing happened on the way to the TARDIS’. And they’d have a cup of tea and laugh about it.  
  
Four hours was when the line between amusement and gut churning, clammy handed fear was crossed, and she finally started imagining what would happen if he never came back. This time, he’d made it pretty clear that he was going. Jumping a horse through a mirror into the past with no way back was a fairly convincing way to say goodbye. She even understood why he’d done it, because standing around and watching someone’s head get chopped off hadn’t been a form of entertainment in polite society since the French had stopped polishing their guillotines. It was just that the French were a bit of a sore point for her, right at the moment, and she had absolutely no idea what to do if he didn’t come back.  
  
At four and a half hours, when she was imagining how slowly her mother would kill him if she ever found out he’d broken his promise to keep her safe, she realised that she knew precisely what to do. She’d done it before, or he’d done it for her.   
  
She couldn’t remember how to fly the TARDIS; all she knew about the last time she’d been stuck in it on her own were some vague details he’d dropped into conversation once over breakfast. Pass the butter dear, and did you know you wiped out the Emperor of the Daleks? Or along those lines at least. But he didn’t look the sort to break his promises, and maybe there was another emergency programme lurking in the databanks just waiting for this sort of disaster. She couldn’t believe he’d just leave her, and Mickey, without a way home.  
  
Mickey, she sighed. This wasn’t turning out to be such a great first adventure for him either. He was off searching for food, doing the practical and ordinary things that defined him. There wasn’t really anything wrong with Mickey, as long as you ignored the fact that he wasn’t the Doctor. At least he’d never left her. She didn’t really want him laughing at her though, if she couldn’t get the TARDIS to tell her anything useful, so she decided not to call him until she’d had a try on her own.  
  
Closing the door behind her, and listening to the sound of her lonely footsteps echoing up the ramp, she acknowledged to herself that if there was another message from the Doctor waiting for her to find it, and if it was anything like the last time he’d said goodbye, she’d rather see it by herself. The TARDIS was cold, and empty, without his energy buzzing around inside it like a caged wasp, and she had the distinct impression that it was sleeping. The longer she spent in it, the more alive it seemed and she could easily believe that in another eight hundred and eighty odd years time she’d be talking to it as much as he did.  
  
Without him though, it was useless, exactly like it had been last Christmas. Exactly like it always was, apart from the single, glorious occasion when she’d persuaded it to work on its own. She strolled across to the viewscreen, almost hoping to catch it unawares, sidling up to it with an enforced calm that she didn’t feel. The picture had gone back to the swirling blue circles that she thought of as a screensaver, but which probably had a much more elaborate name that meant the same thing.   
  
After some searching she located a keyboard, hidden beneath a pile of spare parts that she hadn’t seen moved for over a month. This new Doctor wasn’t as mechanically minded as the last one, although at least she’d never caught him polishing bits of the TARDIS in his spare time. It was only very recently that her mind had stopped flashing her images of short hair and the smell of leather every time someone said his name. She even quite liked the new one, he was certainly more use in conversations about girls things like fashion, and hairstyles, and he’d come to Christmas dinner with her mother, which was more than the last one had ever done. And he was far less inclined to start shouting at her, or to sit for hours staring into space with that look on his face that made her want to hug him tight.   
  
But he was still just a little bit too new, and at night, when she dreamed, it was blue eyes that haunted the darkness.   
  
She thanked the god of translation circuits for the fact that she could understand the letters, and without thinking too hard about what she was doing, she typed ‘emergency programme’ into the keyboard. The letters flashed up onto the screen, replacing the circles and she watched them, half expecting something spectacular to happen immediately. Nothing did. The letters blinked at her. She blinked back. She had no idea what to do next. Of all the stupid, stupid ideas in the world, a human trying to fly a TARDIS had to be the most stupid, she thought, glad that Mickey wasn’t there to agree.   
  
The only thing she could think of to do next was even more ridiculous. Taking a deep breath, and acutely aware that she was talking to thin air, she said, ‘Start.’   
  
Nothing happened.  
  
She tried, ‘emergency programme one,’ and ‘begin,’ and ‘enter,’ and even ‘open sesame,’ because he did, after all, have a strange sense of humour. And then she closed her eyes and thought the same words very, very hard, just in case she had become telepathic in the last five minutes. She would have given up completely if she hadn’t had the very strange sense — almost like catching a flicker of movement out of the corner of one eye and turning to find no one there — that the TARDIS was listening. She hit the return key.  
  
The doors clicked closed. The engine started to move. With a sudden panic, she remembered she’d left Mickey outside on his own. Running down the ramp faster than her legs would carry her, and crashing into the doors as a result, she tried to get out before the ship finished dematerialising. And then, even as she was still hammering on the metal she heard a voice behind her that knocked all the strength from her body.   
  
It was him. That him. The old him. The him who had set this escape route up for her in the first place, the him who had only left her alone because he was dying.   
  
‘This is emergency programme one,’ he said.  
  
She couldn’t look round. She didn’t want to be reminded of the way she’d felt the last time she’d seen him. She’d moved on, for goodness sake. She was coping. Even if it wasn’t exactly the same with the new version, even if she’d found out that when he looked at the world, he saw more women than just her in it. Life didn’t have a rewind button. There wasn’t any going back. Ever. No matter how much she might want to, no matter how many things she’d thought of that she hadn’t told him when she’d hung up his empty jacket in the wardrobe afterwards. It made no difference if she cried in the night, or even just sighed to herself when the new him wasn’t paying attention.  
  
The hologram said her name, and she turned, the way she always did, despite herself, remembering that this image would only last for a few seconds before she lost it too. Hesitantly, with one hand braced against the doors for support, she looked, and then she couldn’t look away. He was so unbearably familiar, standing there, a fragment of the past caught out of time.   
  
He was looking at her with those eyes that told her he’d never seen anything else, and her own blurred into a haze of tears. This was the man who had replaced her old life with himself, and she’d thought it a good exchange, before she lost him, twice over now. With her hands clenched into fists, and reminding herself sternly not to cry, she decided that she’d had quite enough of being left behind.   
  
By the time he got to the bit about hoping for a good death, she’d also realised that she was angry. Rip your arm off and beat you over the head with it angry. I am utterly bereft without you angry. Angry enough to abandon the platitudes she’d peddled to herself that just because he looked a bit different didn’t mean that anything between them had changed. He’d never had the shouting at he deserved.   
  
‘Call that a good death?’   
  
She stormed up the ramp towards the him that wasn’t him, her volume increasing with every step.  
  
‘That was a rubbish death, pathetic. Awful. Want to know why?’  
  
The hologram was twittering on to itself about the TARDIS now. She could barely hear it as she screamed her loss into its face.   
  
‘Because you didn’t even fight it. You just let it happen. You didn’t lift a finger to stop me until it was too late and then you just gave up. When it came right down to it, you gave up.’  
  
The image turned its head away from her vehemence to look at a spot she wasn’t standing on this time round.   
  
‘Have a good life,’ it pleaded.  
  
She stamped her foot at it, her rage beyond reason.  
  
‘How could I have a good life without you?’ she howled past the scraping of her throat and the tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘You left me. I loved you and you left me behind. And I never even told you…’   
  
She wasn’t even sure which Doctor she was talking to anymore. The projection flickered off and the unnoticed engines behind it came to a standstill. She groped her way down the ramp and out of the doors, just wanting to run as far away from the hurt as possible. Outside she stopped, leant back against the TARDIS, and sobbed her heart into the cold air. A voice, and the sound of running footsteps froze her tears in their tracks.  
  
‘I knew it,’ said Mickey, out of breath. ‘I was all the way down Clifton parade and I heard the engines and I thought...’ He trailed off as she turned her horror-struck face towards him. ‘What’s the matter?’  
  
It took several years for her mouth to fall open, while time dragged its heels and decided to have a little lie down. Her brain waded slowly though quicksand. Last time she’d seen Mickey he'd been wearing something different on a spaceship millions of miles and thousands of years away. And he hadn’t been saying things she knew she’d heard before.   
  
Behind her, the TARDIS made a little tut-tut-tutting noise, like an engine on a hot day, and the doors felt unusually warm to the touch. She knew this. She looked around and she knew where she was, the tower blocks, the street, even the cloud patterns looked familiar. More than that, she knew when she was. Emergency programme one was set up to bring her home, and it had to have a time, as well as a location included within it, or she’d have ended up eaten by dinosaurs or enslaved by Martians.   
  
He’d promised to save her, and he had, but she’d come back, back into her own history, back before she looked into the vortex, back before she destroyed the Daleks, back before he left her. She’d crossed her own timeline, whatever that meant. It seemed that her life did have rewind button after all, and she’d pushed it hard.   
  
The relief and the confusion overwhelmed her and she cried in Mickey’s arms. 


	2. Chapter 2

The second best thing about going back into your own past, she found, was not just knowing that the coleslaw tasted disgusting, but being able to cut the fat out of life, to lose all the delays and the politeness and the pointless small talk that slowed everything down. The only talk she had time for now was very very big, and consisted of words like ‘Mum, go and borrow that yellow truck off your mate’, and ‘Mickey — I need the strongest chain you can find’.   
  
But the worst thing about knowing exactly what was going to happen next, was all the thinking in circles that came with it. The last thing the Doctor had said to her, in their last proper conversation — an hour or a couple of months ago, depending on how you looked at it, was that crossing your own timeline was Bad. With a capital Bad. It meant you got caught in events. She didn’t understand what he was talking about any better now than she had then.   
  
She wondered what had happened to the other her — the one who had come back before, argued with her mother, sat in a playground and dithered around a bit, uselessly, before working out what to do. Maybe the other Rose had winked out of existence, like she’d done when she’d changed time to save her father. But that would mean she’d never met the new Doctor, and had never got stranded on a spaceship, and had never come back into her present history. Did it have anything to do with the fact that she'd just landed the TARDIS on top of itself? Could a really careless bit of parking that left two time machines in exactly the same place at exactly the same time cause a wound in time - or something worse? And if this was another wound — where were the Reapers? She didn’t know, because the Doctor wasn’t around to explain it to her. And that was rather the point.  
  
Stuck in the timeline or not, she had absolutely no choice about what to do next. He was still going to be surrounded by Daleks, and he was still going to get killed if she didn’t get there first and save him. Without him, she had no way of finding out what was going on, or of getting back to her own proper future.   
  
But — and this was the best thing about going back in time — she wasn’t even sure that that future still existed. He’d explained once that time wasn’t a straight line, and that it was quite possible to die in your own past. Which, she was sort of, maybe, possibly, hoping with an iron determination so strong she could have used it to batter the TARDIS console open, meant that she could change things. If there was any conceivable way she could arrange it so that he didn’t regenerate in the first place, or failing that, that she didn’t get dumped on a broken down spaceship half built out of people, she was going to make damn sure it happened.  
  
So she kissed her mum, and she kissed Mickey, and she thanked them both very much and said she’d be back for Christmas. And then she hooked the chain into the console and shouted and shouted for more power until the pins holding the panel broke and the doors snapped shut behind her. For the second time in her life, she did something that no one was meant to do once, and she looked into the TARDIS, and the TARDIS looked into her. Neither of them liked what they saw.  
  
The TARDIS was furious, absolutely, blisteringly, blindingly incandescent with rage. Rose had never felt such a concentrated anger in her whole life, and to find it pouring out of a semi-inanimate object was quite a shock. If the TARDIS had had a voice, it would have been screaming. ‘It’ was definitely a ‘she’ Rose quickly realised. Only a woman could master the depths of venom being thrown in her direction, or the sheer inventiveness of the insults cast down upon her head. The worst that the Doctor had ever called her was a stupid ape, but the TARDIS could see a lot further back and Rose was bombarded with pictures of single celled amoebas being favourably compared with her own intelligence. It seemed that even time machines didn’t like being taken for a ride.  
  
She stood, as the golden light flooded into her eyes, and the TARDIS scolded her like a child for doing things she couldn’t possibly understand. Just because the ship had followed her instructions, didn’t mean she’d had to like it, and now that Rose was stuck in the past (or possibly present, she still wasn’t sure which) she was completely dependent on the TARDIS for help. The TARDIS knew it. Not that it bothered to explain why crossing your own timeline was such a shockingly poor idea - Rose got the impression that ship thought she was too dim to understand. She was just told that it was Bad, before the ship diverted into another tirade of abuse.  
  
But the Powell estate was not a nice place to grow up and if there was one thing Rose had learned, it was how to win a catfight. She pulled the TARDIS’s hair. Metaphorically speaking, of course. She thought very, very hard again, about the words from emergency programme one, particularly the bit about leaving the TARDIS alone on a corner to die. The singsong cacophony in her head lessened a bit. The ship was clearly thinking. No woman liked being left behind.  
  
Rose thought about the Doctor, and about how he was the only person in the universe who could actually fly the ship, and about how much better it would be to travel with him, rather than moulder away on Earth. There was a bit less noise, and a bit more listening.   
  
She tried for some sisterly solidarity, giving the machine just a glimpse of how upset she’d been when she lost him, and suggested that maybe they were both in the same position, and that they both needed the Doctor back in order to function properly again. Finally, she hit the TARDIS with a handbag full of grovelling.   
  
She admitted that she was stupid, and a child and she knew she’d done wrong, but she’d made a mistake and all she wanted to do was get back to the Doctor and find out how to put the timeline right. Rose could feel that the ship agreed with that course of action, and she gave it a bit more flattery, not really sure how much of her mind it could read. And, she added, as an afterthought, since this time I’m just going back to rescue him so he can fix the mess I’ve made, and since I know how useless I am, please can I have a lot less power?  
  
The ship seemed to accept the deal, and if more than one of them had had hands, they would have shaken on it. Rose felt the vortex burn itself into her brain, but it didn’t hurt her. The whole of time and space were available inside her head, and there was tremendous power at her fingertips, but it was like she could see it through a closed window, at a slight distance. Almost, it seemed to be a bit busy, doing something else. She couldn’t remember if it had been that way last time, but despite the energy bouncing around in her mind, she was perfectly calm. And she had a plan.   
  
Given any opportunity at all, she was going to destroy the Daleks and give the vortex straight back to the ship. On no account whatsoever was she going to let the Doctor touch her, or even breathe too heavily in her direction, and, just in case he did, she was hoping that a bit less power might mean a bit more leather, and slightly less pinstripe in her future.   
  
The engines ground to a halt, and the TARDIS waited for her to make a move, with an air of having very low expectations. A flick of her mind opened the doors and she stepped out onto Floor 500. The Emperor of the Daleks was reflected on a screen in front of her, all pink and shining, and slightly obscured by the man with his back in the way. Absolutely certain of what she was doing, she opted not to bother with the small talk and cut straight to the complete and utter destruction of the rest of the Dalek race. She opened the window in her head and let the power out to play.   
  
She was still busy watching the patterns the individual atoms of ex-Dalek made as they blew away on the dry winds of space when she head a voice shouting at her.   
  
‘Let go,’ it insisted, and she was tempted to obey it without question, but there was something she was supposed not to be doing, and she couldn’t remember if this was it. She was just wondering whether she could bring the atoms back together and make something pretty when she felt a hand touch the body she’d forgotten she had. Panic gripped her, and because she couldn’t think properly with it open, she slammed down the window in her mind. The power behind the window didn’t seem to notice, carried on swirling away regardless.  
  
She remembered who she was, and she even remembered where she was, which was a good start. But at the sight of the man bending down slowly towards her, his mouth half open, her mind disintegrated into a shout of white noise.   
  
She wailed ‘No!’ through the chaos inside her, and she turned and ran, as fast as she could, away from the window, away from the power, and abruptly, it seemed to switch off, falling away into the darkness lurking inside her head. She ran so far away from herself that she got lost for a while and shadow swallowed her.  
  
When she started to remember her name again, it was only because she’d heard it repeated over and over and over, a string of words drifting into silence. Sometimes the name was angry, shouted, sometimes it was soft; a half felt caress, and other times it was quick, desperate, needy, urgent. However it was said, it was still her name, and she followed the trail of breadcrumbs it left back to her body, heavy with sleep, and the bright spotlight glare that hurt when she opened her eyelids.   
  
She was flat on her back, and she was in a room she’d never seen before, a room that buzzed and made irritating beeping sounds when she tried to sit up. Squinting against the brightness, she concentrated on the only relief from the intrusive scrutiny of the lights — a large, dark shape, sitting beside her on the bed.   
  
The figure came closer, and resolved itself into a man, with dark hair cut so severely short it left a mile wide stretch of forehead exposed, creased into furrowed worry lines, fanning into little crescents of concern around a pair of blue grey eyes. The nose split his face like a wedge, but the lips underneath were familiar as they shaped the syllable of her name. His chin was covered in even more stubble than usual, and his shoulders hunched towards her, too thin without the protection of the coat he usually wore.  
  
‘Rose?’ he said.   
  
Her heart took off, soared so high above her she wasn’t sure how she would ever get it back down. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read my books The Postman's Daughter and The Car Crash Bride by Sally Anne Palmer out now on Amazon


	3. Chapter 3

She struggled to sit up, and he put his hands on her shoulders to hold her down. She could feel him using his weight to keep her pressed to the bed and she lurched against it, just to reassure herself that he was actually real, and actually here.   
  
‘Rose?’ he questioned again, and, she thought, that ordinary, nothing-very-special voice was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.   
  
It made her want to sing, or dance, or do something else that would involve her looking stupid and not caring. Instead, she knocked his hands away and flung her arms around his neck, her head over one shoulder, a second skin against his chest. She held him as hard as she possibly could, and she felt his arms come up to hug her back, squeezing the breath out of her before they relaxed and fell away. She didn’t let him go. She was fairly certain she was never, ever going to let him go again, not so long as she could feel his heartbeats throbbing through her, not so long as she could fill her nose with that special scent that meant only him.   
  
He rubbed her back a bit awkwardly, but she held onto him with a rock hard determination that would have left granite shamefaced. He shifted beneath her, and she knew he was starting to get embarrassed, never one for big displays of affection. She was fully intending to roll every single scrap of feeling she’d ever had for him into one enormous festival of affection and dance it right round his head. He straightened up, and firmly removed her arms from his neck.   
  
But he wasn’t fast enough to catch her hands as they leaped to his face. She ran her fingers over the top of skull, over his temples, her palms pressed against his cheekbones as her nails traced the curve of his ears. She cupped his face in both hands with her thumbs under his chin, raised trembling digits to stroke his eyebrows, ran a nervous trail of fingertips across his lips. Wide eyed, he stared at her in bewilderment, letting her explore his features for a bit longer before taking her hands and folding them into his lap.  
  
Instantly, she laced her fingers through his, wanting as much contact as she could possibly get without ripping all his clothes off and holding him, skin to skin. Her thoughts skittered to a halt. Clothes. Skin. More skin.   
  
There was an image she’d never seen before parading in front of her mind’s eye. In all the time she’d known him, in all the hours she’d spent telling herself how much she loved him when he wasn’t around to tell anymore, she’d never thought of him quite like this. They were pink and fluffy daydreams compared to the reality sitting in front of her. She’d never really seen him as a ‘him’. Underneath all that Time Lord was a man just bursting to get out. She looked at her hands, held in his lap. Possibly. And with that thought came quite another unexpected and detailed little picture for her to watch. Also, she remembered with a start, her recollection of the last thing she’d seen before passing out coming back to call, he’d been on the verge of kissing her. He was probably trying to save her life of course, or saying goodbye, all perfectly deniable now, but the thought had been there nonetheless.   
  
He cleared his throat. She raised her eyes from his trousers guiltily, a slight warmth heating her face.   
  
‘Rose, you look like you’ve forgotten who I am,’ he said with half a question and a hint of exasperation.  
  
She smiled, shook her head. ‘I’d never forget you,’ she replied. ‘My Doctor.’  
  
He gave her an icy stare, and let go of her hands, having to put them back in her own lap when she showed no sign of removing them from his.   
  
‘I’m guessing — by the gaping hole in my ship — that you opened the vortex and the TARDIS brought you back here, yes?’  
  
She nodded at him happily, smiling a bit more. She was never going to stop smiling at him again.   
  
‘Why?’ he demanded.  
  
Her smile died. This was the point when she was supposed to confess. This was the bit where she was supposed to say — I’m not the girl you think I am. I crossed my own timeline, I’m Rose from the future. At least I think so, because in that future you don’t exist. You’ve changed. This you is dead. And then after he’d finished shouting at her — because with this one you had to be prepared for the shouting — he’d either tell her it was fine, or he’d insist on going back and dying all over again. She could count the number of times things had actually turned out fine on one finger of one hand. ‘Everybody lives’ had only happened the once, and that probably meant he’d try to find another rewind button. She didn’t want to lose him again, not so soon. But if she didn’t tell him straightaway, and he found out later, the shouting would be a lot louder.  
  
She took a deep breath, held out her right hand and automatically he took it, enclosing it in both of his. She opened her mouth, and the words sprang onto her lips from nowhere.  
  
‘I want you safe.’  
  
He just stared at her. Sat quite still and looked right into her, and there was a something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. A tiny little something, just peeping out to put a toe in the water and hiding away again. The kind of a something that made the whole room tense, and hush, and hold its breath, and wait for something more.   
  
His gaze fell to the floor, and he mumbled, ‘Alright,’ shot off the edge of the bed and marched straight out of the room.  
  
She thought, he can’t complain I never tried. There was a whole explanation coming, if he’d only stayed to listen to it. I want you safe so I went back in time by accident and please don’t shout at me etc etc. It wasn’t her fault that the words hadn’t all had time to come out. Now she had another couple of hours with him at least, before she could reasonably try again.   
  
That great, beaming, glittering smile worked its way back onto her face and she swung her legs off the end of the bed, giving what was obviously the sickbay a cursory glance before standing, feeling dizzy, making several false starts and then heading out of the room.   
  
She decided that the blue t-shirt had had enough excitement for one day and she wondered whether clothes could cross timelines too. Given how many times the miniskirt had come back in, it was harder not to believe in a fashion vortex. She’d updated her wardrobe recently, and with any luck, and since technically this was the same TARDIS, just in a different present, her best top should have come with her too.  
  
Four minutes and thirty seven seconds later, having decided that was all the time she wanted to spend without him, she was back in the console room, listening to him croon over the damage to his ship. The sympathetic patting and the half whispered words of support were a bit excessive though, and since the ship sounded distinctly like it was purring, she concluded that you didn’t need a body to be two faced. At length, he noticed that she was watching him with her arms folded and he backed away from the console immediately.  
  
‘Nothing I can’t fix,’ he shrugged brusquely, brushing off the eye rolling she was giving him. ‘Where next?’  
  
‘Home,’ she replied instantly. ‘I promised I’d go back and it’ll be Christmas Day by now.’  
  
‘Will it? How can you tell?’ He gave her a sharp look.  
  
‘Well, they were putting up the decorations when I left,’ she lied through her teeth.   
  
He turned, checked the panel, and she held her breath, just waiting for him to find something that didn’t make sense. She guessed there were a lot of things to find, like, how much the milometer had gone up since the last time he’d looked at it for example, or the list of recently set co-ordinates in the navigation system — assuming the TARDIS had either of those things. Even the jumpseat had been set slightly closer to the ground. But he didn’t notice, or maybe he was concentrating on something else, because he just started pushing buttons.  
  
‘Must have been gone longer than I thought,’ he muttered, distracted, and she breathed out with a tiny sigh of relief. He flashed her a look. ‘Like the new haircut by the way.’  
  
Her legs shaking slightly, she went to sit down, surreptitiously adjusting the chair, amazed that she’d managed to locate the only man in the galaxy who actually noticed when she’d had her hair done, whether she wanted him to or not.   
  
The sky was grey, when she stepped out of the doors, and empty. She stopped, doing a complete circuit of the heavens just to make absolutely sure there weren’t any enormous spaceships hovering below the clouds that she had missed. She watched every single person they passed on their way up to her mother’s flat for signs of being a robot Santa Claus, but no one tried to kill her, and most people didn’t even glance her way. She was practically hopping around with excitement by the time they got to the front door.   
  
This changing time business was easy, she thought. No regeneration, no pilot fish, no big bad alien threat. There would be Sycorax children all over the universe thanking the name of Rose Tyler for the fact that their parents hadn’t been vaporised. And think of all those colds people wouldn’t be getting after not standing around on the edge of buildings all day. If not for the small matter of having to tell the Doctor that he should be dead, today would be a brilliant, wonderful, fantastic day.  
  
She remembered that it was. It was Christmas Day, the best day of the whole year, a day for families, and getting presents, and unspoiled happiness. She decided to give herself the present she wanted most — to spend the day just enjoying having him around. She could tell him tonight. No one who counted — and she wasn’t including square shaped blue things in the count, because they didn’t — could possibly expect her to ruin Christmas Day.  
  
She glanced up at his sulky face as they walked along the balcony to the flat and since he hadn’t spoken for at least ten minutes, she could tell he wasn’t happy about going to her mother’s for Christmas. A nasty little idea formed at the back of her mind.   
  
She took his hand. ‘You don’t have to stay long,’ she offered. ‘Just show them you’re still alive and leave, I don’t mind.’   
  
He shrugged, but he squeezed her hand in return.  
  
She rang the doorbell and Jackie answered with a high pitched screech and an explosion of blue denim. ‘Rose,’ she screamed, and gathered her daughter into the tightest of tight hugs. ‘You came back. And on Christmas Day. Sweetheart, I was so worried about you, stuck in that stupid box all on your own. Anything could have happened.’  
  
Rose cleared her throat, pulling back and jerking her head in the Doctor’s general direction. Jackie looked over at him and her volume was only slightly lower, into earscraping rather than deafening as she said, ‘You.’  
  
The Doctor’s hand tightened convulsively on Rose’s as her mother launched herself at him instead. Grabbing him around the neck she planted a wet, sloppy kiss firmly on his mouth. Rose’s fingers were making cracking noises under the strain.   
  
‘Thank you for sending her home,’ said Jackie, seriously, and then, she frowned. ‘And don’t think that means you’re getting lucky.’  
  
She turned and disappeared inside the flat, leaving a trail of half welcoming, half sarcastic comments in her wake as she headed for the kitchen to put the kettle on.   
  
The Doctor dropped Rose's fingers, wiped his lips on the back of his hand and pulled a face at her. ‘Nine hundred years and I’ve never been kissed by someone’s mother either,’ he said, following his attacker down the hall.  
  
Rose closed the door behind them, smelling the familiar turkey and burning aroma of Christmas Day at home. Her heart sang so loudly it could have auditioned for the Sound of Music.   
  
‘Yeah,’ she agreed, ‘can’t believe she got in first.’  
  
His head snapped round to face her so fast he forgot to look where he was going and walked straight into the living room door. Mickey’s laugh rolled out of the room, covering the string of loud curses that preceded the Doctor and his bruised head. Mickey bounded off the sofa and gave Rose a bone cracking hug.   
  
‘Did you have to bring him back?’ he asked, eyeing the man now sitting in the armchair closest to the TV and changing channels with the sonic screwdriver.  
  
She shrugged. ‘Didn’t have to, but it wouldn’t have been the same without his smiling little face.’  
  
The Doctor’s face could have cracked concrete.   
  
‘Besides, he might eat mum’s sprouts. It’d stop her trying to feed them all to you.’  
  
Mickey laughed. ‘And he’s an alien. We could tell him they’re an Earth speciality or something.’   
  
‘Still here,’ said the alien in the chair. ‘Not deaf. And don’t follow that with an ear joke.’  
  
Mickey closed his mouth and sat down on the settee, adopting a conspiratorial, man-to-man type air, that was completely ruined by the wink he gave Rose. ‘So,’ he asked. ‘What’s it made of then?’  
  
The Doctor frowned, clearly deciding whether or not to take the bait. ‘What?’ he said eventually.  
  
‘Your ship. Whatever it is, you’ve been done, mate. I couldn’t shift that hatch open with the car, but a couple of good revs with the truck and it smashed right off. Easy as you like. Didn’t even have to put my foot down. Great bits of metal just raining down all over the shop. There's still pieces in the street. And I thought alien tech was supposed to be all flash and superior. Where’d you get yours — ET’s dustbin?’  
  
The Doctor looked up between the fingers that were now covering his eyes and stopped wincing. ‘Mindless vandalism.’ He shook his head.  
  
‘Saved your life,’ Mickey threw back.  
  
‘Oi!’ he retorted. ‘I had a whole plan going on there. The Daleks didn’t stand a chance.’  
  
‘Oh, okay,’ Rose chipped in. ‘What was this plan then —stare them to death? Get a bit sarcastic and hope they’d get scared and roll away?’   
  
Jackie came in with the tea and disrupted his snappy comeback. He stood up. ‘Right, well, it’s been a pleasure but like you say, I’ve got to go and pick up bits of spaceship off the street. Have a nice time decking the halls or whatever.’  
  
Rose followed him down the undecked hall, tapping her watch. ‘Now that was a personal best. What’d you manage — three minutes before getting in a strop?’  
  
He opened the door with more than the force it needed and stepped outside.   
  
‘I’ll see you back at the TARDIS in two hours okay?’ she said.   
  
He nodded, distracted, fiddling in his pocket for the key. She seized her chance, grabbing hold of the lapels of his coat with both hands and, pressing herself close against him, reached up to give him a quick kiss on the lips, no more than a touch, and then dropped back off her tiptoes. She closed the door on his gathering smile. Opened it again immediately to see him still standing there with an enormous grin plastered all over his face.   
  
‘Oh, and since its Christmas, I’ll be wanting a present.’   
  
Closed the door again to the sound of a very heavy sigh.  
  
And that, she thought, hunched down against the frame and listening to him stand there for a while before finally walking away, was how to kiss a Time Lord. For the first time anyway. She felt her stomach tie itself into delightful knots at the thought of a next time. It was going to be a perfect day after all. Plus, she had a plan, and it was about to go into action.   
  
‘Mum,’ she called.  
  
There were precisely seventy three minutes between the time she closed the door, to the time she saw him striding through the smoke that filled the console room. She knew, because she was counting the minutes off, and marking every tenth one with a drink. It was Christmas after all, and sherry was compulsory, especially if you had a rough night ahead of you, and bad news to give.   
  
He was looking extraordinarily calm as he coughed his way through the thick air, hands in his pockets. ‘Did you know that practically nothing is open on Christmas Day?’ he remarked.  
  
She took a swig from her glass, trying to be unconcerned by his unconcern. ‘Of course,’ she replied.   
  
‘Yeah, thought so,’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘So the TARDIS looks a bit ….different today. Something you want to tell me?’   
  
‘Ah ha!’ She crooked her finger at him, taking another gulp. ‘TARDIS.’   
  
He waited while she took a deep breath, and coughed a bit.   
  
‘Time And Relative Dimension — or Dimensions, I wasn’t really listening — In Space. I brought the ‘relative’. Well, you were never going to come to us, were you?’   
  
Jackie’s voice echoed from the kitchen. ‘Tell him his oven’s broken.’  
  
He took the glass from Rose, sniffed it, and downed it in one. ‘That’s not an oven,’ he yelled back. ‘Better get me some more of that,’ he said, indicating the glass. ‘And I do not do paper hats.’  
  
He went to the kitchen to rescue the turkey, or the TARDIS, whichever was in most danger. She set up a table to one side of the console, set four places, and put out four crackers, just to see the look on his face.   
  
Over the surprisingly unsinged turkey she smiled at him. She smiled when he laughed. She smiled when he didn’t. Most of the time she just smiled because she wanted to. He only returned her smiles once or twice, because he seemed to be concentrating on making an effort. He was civil to her mother, and he talked to her about cooking, and the Queen’s speech, and the sort of Christmases that she’d had when she was a child, because he’d been to a couple back then himself. She guessed he must have been reading up on football too, because he’d never shown the slightest interest before, but he managed to have a detailed conversation with Mickey about it. She thought, in two hours all this will be over and he’ll be gone again.  
  
She topped up his glass, and her own, at regular intervals, although it didn’t seem to be having any effect on him, while she was sliding around in her chair. She found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything Mickey was saying to her because her whole body was tuned into the reactions of the man sitting in the next chair along. Only an hour, she thought, and all this will be over.  
  
She put her hand on his leg under the table when her mother poured half a bottle of brandy over the plate and set fire to the Christmas pudding and most of the table cloth. He didn’t make a sound, and he didn’t move away, so she left her hand lying there for a minute or so, learning the texture of his jeans, the hard muscles in his thigh underneath. She only pulled her fingers back when she caught Mickey looking at her with a hurt expression, and she wondered if she’d been too obvious. The Doctor just shifted a bit in his chair, and didn’t meet her glance.   
  
Eventually, when her mother was almost too drunk to stand up, there were tears, and goodbyes and a hard hug from Mickey as he looked at her seriously and told her to take care. The TARDIS doors closed behind them. The invasion was over.   
  
The Doctor took off his paper hat, and collapsed onto the jumpseat. She fiddled with the plates on the table. Brick by invisible brick, a heavy wall of silence built between them. She’d put it off long enough. This was confession time. She left the Christmas debris scattered where it had fallen and walked over to where he was sitting, his feet propped on the edge of the console. He seemed to be having trouble looking at her, biting the edge of a nail or drinking out of the champagne flute he’d held onto, and he was humming something she didn’t recognise. She knew she was weaving slightly unsteadily as she approached, and when she finally stopped, and faced him, and saw that he was staring at her now so intently his gaze would have left a smoking hole in the back wall, she had to put her hand on the console for support.   
  
Support was the last thing that the TARDIS was going to give her. A flash of heat ran through her fingers, a sudden surge of burning power so strong she had to snatch her hand away with a cry. She stared in confusion at the red weals starting to rise on her fingertips. ‘Ouch’ didn’t cover it.   
  
Swiftly, he leaned forward, caught hold of her other hand and pulled her down onto the seat beside him. ‘Let me see,’ he said, taking the injured hand in his own.  
  
She sat next to him, right next to him, her hip pressed into his hip, her shoulder touching his arm, and she didn’t think about the pain, or about what the TARDIS was trying to say, in its not very subtle way. All she cared about was keeping absolutely still, while he cradled her hand and his thumb traced her palm in a delicate, barely there brush that might have been called a caress.  
  
‘Doesn’t look too bad — does it hurt?’   
  
She shook her head, because anything and everything but him was currently irrelevant.   
  
‘Must be a short circuit,’ he commented, waving the sonic screwdriver over her burnt flesh with a cooling swipe. ‘Sorry about that.’   
  
He relaxed against the seat, taking her back with him as she leant against his side. He didn’t let go of her hand. She watched it lying in his lap, pale and small, surrounded in the protective curve of his fingers, while his thumb continued its soft tracery in the hollow of her palm. She put her head on his shoulder. His other hand came up, his fingers replacing his thumb in drawing tentative circles over her skin. Everywhere he touched her was a gentle lick of comfort, and she relaxed, alcohol and Christmas and the warmth of his body drawing her in. She couldn’t tell if he was looking at her or not. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Her concentration narrowed to the spellbinding patterns he was outlining on her hand. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else existed.  
  
‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Barcelona. Not the city Barcelona, the planet Barcelona.’   
  
The rumble of his voice passed though his chest and into her body with a deep bass lullaby.   
  
She snuggled closer. ‘Tell me about the dogs again,’ she mumbled, her eyes closing. She fell asleep to the sound of him talking against the quiet hum of the ship, wrapped in a soothing cloak of darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read my books - The Postman's Daughter and The Car Crash Bride by Sally Anne Palmer, available now on Amazon.


	4. Chapter 4

The next day when she woke, she felt like someone had routed a space/time vortex straight into her stomach, and it was only a matter of time before the turkey currently occupying that space was catapulted into the middle of next week. Without opening her eyes she rolled over and vomited over the side of the bed, completely missing the bucket that had been thoughtfully put out to catch just such an occurrence. She turned over onto her back as slowly as possible and opened bleary eyes to the ceiling of her bedroom. The noise of liquid slithering between the tiny grates in the floor made her smile, although it was an effort even to move those muscles.   
  
That would serve the TARDIS right for burning her, she thought, idly rubbing at fingertips that just weren’t hurting any more. She remembered the Doctor holding her hand, and she wondered if the sonic screwdriver had a previously unknown kiss it better function, because whatever he had done had wiped away the pain like chalk off a blackboard. She was sure the man himself hadn’t kissed it better. In fact, she couldn’t recall him doing anything except hold her hand while she fell asleep. Now she was in bed, in her own bed, and wearing her favourite pyjamas. She couldn’t be entirely sure how she’d got there, and more worryingly, neither did she know who had taken her clothes off. Fervently, she hoped that it was her. If the Doctor was ever going to undress her, and that was a monstrously big if, she wanted to at least be conscious while he did it. Plus, pink pyjamas with bunnies on were hardly the biggest turn on in the world, and she didn’t want to draw attention to just how much younger than him she was either.  
  
Picking through the fragmentary shards of recollection her memory thrust her way she didn’t find a picture of him in her room, which was probably a blessing. She also didn’t find anything involving the words ‘timeline’, and ‘crossing’, and lots and lots of shouting. Despite all her preparation, and all the sherry, she still hadn’t told him the truth. She leaned over the side of the bed again, and managed to hit the bucket this time. Wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, she groped on the bedside table, encountering a handy glass of water and a couple of painkillers among the books, and tissues and other junk that usually cluttered it up.   
  
Swallowing them down, she decided to be ashamed of herself and to do something about it but much, much later, when her hangover had gone away. In need of a lot more water she hoisted herself out of bed, her lips dry and her head beating out a pleasant little ditty that made it very hard to think about anything else. She didn’t care that her hair must be tangled into knots, and that there was probably make up caked all down her face. She shuffled off down the much too white corridor and into the blinding glare of the kitchen.  
  
The Doctor was washing up, and singing to himself. She stood for a minute, and just enjoyed the spectacle. Over his jumper, and tied around his waist at the back where she could see it, was the unmistakeable frill of an apron. Her hangover decided to hang somewhere else for a while, and she leant against the doorframe with a grin so wide it went from ear to ear and practically met around the back of her head. He put a plate on the draining board. He was wearing rubber gloves. She snorted with laughter, tried to hide it, looked up almost straight-faced when he turned around.   
  
‘Thought you didn’t do domestic?’ she queried in a tone edged with innocence.  
  
The apron disappeared into a cupboard faster than you could say ‘Gallifrey’s Greatest Gourmet’ and he whipped off the rubber gloves with a grimace. ‘I have to, if your mother can’t tell the difference between a dishwasher and a cooker,’ he snapped. ‘And I didn’t notice you offering to help either. You’ve been asleep for hours.’  
  
Her hangover decided the respite was over, and came back with a vengeance. She dropped into a chair heavily, and placed her hands flat on the table, staring at it fixedly and hoping that the metal would stop going round in circles soon. He waited for a response for a while, and then silently placed a big glass of water, and an even larger mug of tea in front of her. The water and half the tea were gone, and he was sitting next to her watching with amusement before she spoke again.  
  
‘Yeah, about last night,’ she started slowly. ‘Tell me again what happened?’  
  
He rubbed his hands with glee. ‘Well, you downed nearly a whole bottle of sherry. Your mother got so drunk she tried to suck all the brandy she’d split out of the tablecloth when the rest ran out. Mickey retuned the viewscreen into some dodgy porn channel and swore blind he was looking for the football. The console room stinks of burning and there are streamers wedged so high up on the support beams that I can’t reach them down. It was great. I don’t know why I’ve never done it before.’  
  
She gave him a long, hard look, causing herself quite a bit of anguish as she forced her eyes into focus. He had a grin on his face and she absolutely could not tell if he was being genuine, or really, really sarcastic. She decided to ignore him, either way.  
  
‘And then?’ she asked.  
  
He dropped his gaze to the table, finding his clasped hands supremely interesting for a while. ‘And then you fell asleep.’  
  
That wasn’t nearly enough detail. She tried again. ‘And then?’ She thought there might possibly be the beginnings of a blush on his face.  
  
‘And then I carried you to bed,’ he said quietly, and she could feel the atmosphere in the room shift a bit.   
  
There was an expectant silence gathering in the pause before she spoke, a quiet tinged with all the different possibilities that remained to be voiced. ‘And then?’ she asked again.  
  
He raised his eyes to hers, and there was no hint of humour in this manner. ‘Do you want there to be an ‘and then’? Seriously?’ he asked, searching her gaze.  
  
She squirmed uncomfortably under his scrutiny and a wave of hot embarrassment broke over her face. She tried hard not to remember those detailed little thoughts she’d started having about him yesterday, and she glanced down significantly at her pyjamas, but she didn’t say no.   
  
He looked a bit relieved, cut the sudden knot of tension with a laugh. He patted her hand. ‘No — not guilty. If I’d undressed you, you’d remember, believe me.’  
  
She smiled at his confidence, took another sip of tea to cover the instant twinge of disappointment that raced through her.   
  
He stood up. ‘Come and find me when you’re ready to go out. I’ll be the one up the ladder.’  
  
It took another couple of hours and a compensatory plate of fried breakfast before she was feeling well enough to get dressed and go and see him again. She stepped into the console room with last night’s pre-prepared speech about accidental time travel on her lips. As soon as she opened her mouth he grabbed her hand, and tugged her out of the door, clearly impatient to be gone.   
  
‘Welcome to Barcelona,’ he said, indicating the riot of colour and movement surrounding them with a proud wave. ‘Come on.’  
  
He took her hand, and led her off into the crowd, her mouth still open as she took in the spectacle around her. It looked like he’d parked right in the middle of the pavement, because there was a wall of people on all sides in a heaving sea of bodies. Not all of them were people either, there were a vast array of aliens of more kinds than she could count, tall and short, humanoid, nothing like humanoid, and some that language just curled up and refused to describe. It was immensely noisy, a babble of chatter so loud she had to concentrate hard to pick out one voice from the rest. The Doctor’s hand tightened on hers as he led the way through the jostling throng, past elbows and tentacles and metal limbs that wedged into her as she barged her way past.   
  
After about ten minutes of pushing the Doctor had reached the front of the crowd and with the hand that wasn’t still holding hers he pointed up the street, between the tall buildings edging it in on either side. ‘Here they come,’ he said.  
  
Towards her, awkwardly marching in single file, came a collection of the most oddly dressed aliens she’d ever seen. They were at least as tall as a house, moving on long spindly legs, and were basically human shaped, although they were dressed in such bright colours that she had to squint her eyes. A dazzling morass of vivid yellow, acid green, orange and turquoise and shocking pink advanced slowly, the colours dancing and spinning as she watched. It was not the best hangover cure she’d ever seen. Their arms were unnaturally long, and covered in billowing sleeves, but the heads of the first couple of figures were no bigger than hers, save for the huge feathered headdresses they carried.   
  
She tugged the Doctor’s sleeve with her free hand. Her other hand was still wrapped in his. That in itself was a bit — odd — she thought. Usually when they left the TARDIS there’d be handholding, and then when he was sure she wouldn’t wander off he’d let her go, and then she would probably wander off, before grabbing his hand again for the journey back to the ship. This time, they were pressed side by side into a sandwich of people, and she wasn’t going anywhere, but he still had hold of her hand. She wasn’t going to let go until he did.   
  
He looked down at her and pointed up at the walking figures. ‘They’re just costumes,’ he shouted. ‘This whole thing is a parade. They put it on for tourists. Inside they look pretty similar to you.’   
  
‘Are they from Earth then?’ she asked.  
  
He nodded. ‘They left Earth when the population expanded too much to cope with and travelled here. This planet was a dump when they found it. Really — a dump. It had been used for getting rid of rubbish for thousands of years. They sweetened it up a bit and set up a holiday destination. Now they have parades and fireworks nearly every night of the week, just like the first Barcelona did years ago.’  
  
The rest of his words were drowned out by the band, spaced out between the marching giants and raising a din of such huge proportions that she wanted to put her hands over her ears.   
  
He leaned down close again. ‘Look’ — pointing with his other hand — ‘that one’s supposed to be a matador. And that one’s a bull.’  
  
And for at least an hour they stood together and watched the carnival pass by, her fingers still gripped securely in his, as he explained the significance of the various costumes. After a while the line of dancers thinned out, and he said ‘Okay, - there’ll be a bit of a break. Do you want anything?’  
  
She mimed a drink, because a brass playing musician had stopped right in front of her and she couldn’t hear herself think. He released her hand at last, and disappeared off into the crowd, returning a while later with a transparent two handled mug which shone with a thick blue liquid. Resuming his place at her side he passed it to her, smiling, and it was so heavy she needed both the handles and both her hands, just to lift it. As she raised it to her mouth she felt his arm slip round her waist, gently, delicately, and so lightly he could easily have claimed not to have been doing it at all. She hid the instantaneous flush of elation she felt behind the rim of the cup, finding it quite testing to drink and grin at the same time. She took another gulp, and then deliberately pushed herself closer against his side as she stretched up to yell in his ear. His arm settled firmly round her waist, one finger through the belt loop of her jeans when he felt the pressure of her body against his.  
  
‘It’s horrible. It doesn’t taste of anything,’ she howled at the top of her lungs, and she beamed at him as if she’d said something completely different.   
  
He glanced down at her for a long moment, during which the noise of the music grew quieter and the close press of the crowd seemed slightly further away. There was a light in his eyes that she didn’t recognise, and a small smile played around the corners of his mouth.   
  
He shrugged. ‘I told you last night. They’ve got dogs with no noses. And people with no noses too. They live on a planet covered in rubbish and they had to de-evolve their sense of smell — and taste — just to make it bearable. It’s a great place to look at, but the food’s awful.’  
  
She took another couple of swallows, but the drink didn’t get any better, and spotting a nearby bin, she pulled away from his encircling arm to dump the container and its contents. She felt his gaze on her all the way there and all the way back although she didn’t dare look up to check. Her heart was beating much too fast and she was glad they weren’t holding hands anymore because her palms were sweating. Something was going on here, something more than just a trip to a strange planet and a laugh at the natives’ expense. Something was changing, and she didn’t want it to stop.   
  
She fought her way back to his side, as the procession stared moving again. Quickly, before she could pause and think too carefully, she slid her hand underneath his coat and around his waist, feeling his arm settle back onto her hip at the same time. She shivered, just a little bit, because the taut muscles in his back just above the waistband of his jeans were resting against her arm, and because she could feel him breathing, and because he felt her shiver and pulled her tighter.  
  
For a while they stood there, as an island of stillness in the moving multitude of people, sights and sounds and colours flowing around them and leaving their calm untouched. Rose kept her eyes focused on the procession, watched the dancers as they watched her back, but she was barely aware of what she was doing.   
  
After a while, she felt she had to say something, so she leaned into him again, and shouted, ‘Some of them are looking at me.’  
  
His other hand came round and touched the end of her nose. ‘They think you’re some kind of genetic throwback,’ he explained, having to shout twice to make himself understood.  
  
‘What does that make you?’ she asked, with a combination of hand gestures and sounds.  
  
He didn’t answer, and he just looked down at her, for a length of time that stretched into eternity. The smile on his lips had made it into his eyes and they shone brighter than all the garish colour swirling round him. A loud bang overhead made her jump and broke the spell. His mouth moved, but there was no way she could hear him against the ‘oohs’, and ‘aahs’ and cackles, squeaks and beeps coming from the crowd, like bonfire night but with added alien. With a smooth action that was over before she noticed it, he stepped behind her, wrapping both arms around her waist and pulling her back into the shelter of his embrace.  
  
She felt him blow in her ear, much, much closer than he had ever been before. ‘I said, look up.’  
  
It seemed easier just to do what he said, and she leaned back against him, her head resting on his chest and she locked her own arms over his, so he couldn’t pull away. The strength of his body supported her weight, and the beating of his hearts was louder in her ears than the fireworks. After a period which could have been minutes and could have been hours, she noticed that the fireworks were exploding less and less frequently, and the crowd around them was starting to thin out.  
  
His breath warmed the inside of her ear again. ‘Are you watching this anymore?’  
  
She shook her head, mutely and heard him sigh.  
  
‘Me neither,’ he said happily.  
  
So they stood together while the crowd became a group and the group became pairs, and the rest of the pairs wandered away, until the only pair left was the one just starting to be a couple.   
  
She felt warm breath on her neck, just below her ear, a subtle exhalation that was the most intimate touch he’d ever given her.   
  
‘Home?’ he asked, and it was only with regret for the loss of contact that she agreed, and took up his hand again for the walk back to the ship.   
  
With his key in the lock he turned, and she could tell that something between them was about to change forever. She willed it on with a passion seeded in loss; she willed it on with moist lips and eyes that glowed with readiness. She willed it on with everything inside her that knew the name of need. He came closer. And then, he looked away, looked down, looked confused, looked in his pocket.  
  
He flipped opened the psychic paper and read it out with a puzzled expression. ‘Ward 26. Please come.’ He offered it to her. ‘What do you think — telepathic phone call?’  
  
She took the page mechanically, while her heart screamed unheard inside her chest that this couldn’t possibly be happening, couldn’t possibly be real. She knew those words, she knew where they led, she even knew who had sent them. But it looked like she was going to have to find out all over again. She handed the paper back, the mood broken, shattered into tiny pieces of what might have been.  
  
‘You’ll want to go and find out about that tomorrow, won’t you?’ she asked, and it was more a certainty than a question.   
  
As soon as he nodded she smiled brightly, pushed open the door and walked calmly past him into the TARDIS. She gave him a wave, and a quick goodnight, before escaping to nurse her terror in the solitude of her room. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read The Postman's Daughter and The Car Crash Bride by Sally Anne Palmer out now on Amazon.


	5. Chapter 5

She didn’t sleep. She didn’t even lie down. She paced her room until she got claustrophobic and then she went out to wander the darkened corridors of the ship, mostly darkened because the TARDIS kept turning the lights off on her. She tried to ignore the smug self satisfaction she could feel breathing out of the walls.   
  
This wasn’t so much thinking in circles as drowning in a whirlpool. The words were identical, not some accidental familiarity she could pass off as the universe hiding a whoopee cushion and running away, but exactly the same. Which meant lots and lots of things that all led back to the same place. Fate. Predestination. Some divine plan reasserting itself, religion found hiding in the cupboard under the sink. She could think of some fairly pointed questions to ask God, if she’d found him/her/it/them at last. The same words on the same bit of paper were a sign that no matter how much she’d thought she’d changed the future, some things were meant to be. Fixed, like time was repeating itself in a loop. Except that she’d never been to Barcelona before, and she’d never spent the whole evening just being held by the Doctor while night, and a cascade of half made promises, fell around them. She’d never been quite so sure he was about to take her to bed either. She’d never been quite so sure she wanted to go.  
  
So just because the words were the same didn’t necessarily mean that everything else had to be too. Maybe the Face of Boe was just using a really, really good postal service to make sure his message got delivered. She hoped so. She crossed her fingers and touched wood and wished she had a rabbit’s foot and she hoped so. There probably wasn’t a lot else she could do about it apart from hope. There was only one person she could ask, and he was probably asleep in bed down one of the pitch black hallways she kept passing. If he even slept. Or had a bed, for that matter.   
  
A line out of one of the Terminator movies kept sneaking into her head, and it wasn’t the ‘I’ll be back’ one either, although she could see how that would work too. ‘No fate but what we make’ or something like that, anyway. She’d spent many unhappy hours lying on her bed, telling herself that she loved him, although she’d never said the words to his face. She was basically here, stubbing her toe against blank walls in the dark because she loved him enough to want to bring him back, and she loved him enough to want to keep him with her, and not get dumped alone on a spaceship somewhere. She loved him enough to want to see if love was stronger than fate, stronger than time. Could she change the future? Could she change her own fate, and his too?   
  
There was no way she was going to go confessing to him now, not until she knew for a fact whether or not God existed. It was quite a big question to answer in a day trip to New Earth, but everyone had to start somewhere. God was supposed to be all about love and saving people — wasn’t he/she/it/whatever? All she needed to do was wake up tomorrow and see what happened. Maybe the words weren’t important, maybe everything would turn out differently, maybe she didn’t have to repeat the future. She hoped not.   
  
She checked her watch. It was already tomorrow. Not really recognising where she was, she headed as best she could to her room, before the TARDIS switched off all the lights in a fit of pique and left her in the dark. She opened the first door handle she found, and because she wasn’t in the middle of a steamy romantic novel, it did not lead to the Doctor’s room and a couple of hours of smouldering passion. She spent the rest of the night dozing in a broom cupboard and only found her way back though the corridors when the ship announced morning with some fake bird noises and a blinding light that woke her up. Even her shower was cold.  
  
By the time she was changed and ready to go, having avoided all impulses in the direction of blue blouses and going with a white t-shirt instead, the Doctor had already made it outside. He looked at her uncertainly as she closed the door behind them.   
  
‘This is the year five billion and twenty three,’ he said, and proceeded to tell her quite a lot of things she already knew, although in a slightly different order. He pointed in the direction of the hospital. ‘That way, I think.’  
  
He started to walk off, his boots crunching into the grass and releasing a golden, delicious smell into the air. He did not, at any time, reach for her hand. In fact, he was off so fast she had trouble catching up with him, his hands shoved in his pockets and his head down, concentrating on covering the fairly long distance to the infirmary as swiftly as possible.   
  
She knew him well enough to tell what was wrong. He thought he’d gone too far. He thought he’d pushed her into something on Barcelona that she wasn’t ready for, and that she’d used the psychic paper’s message last night as an excuse to run off and avoid him. So now he was trying to give her a choice back. Sometimes he was so insufferably noble that she just wanted to kick him. She forced her hand through the crook of his arm, having to run a bit to keep up with his long strides.  
  
‘Can I just say,’ she started, and then realised that those words had a nasty re-used ring about them. ‘I want you to know that I love travelling with you. Really.’  
  
He shrugged his shoulders and didn’t look round. ‘Yeah, but sometimes I take you places that you don’t want to go.’  
  
Her fingers crept down the inside of his arm and into his pocket, finding the hand inside that was circled into a fist. ‘No,’ she answered carefully. ‘I want to go wherever you go. Sometimes you don’t take me as far as I’d like.’  
  
He gave her a quick look, as if he didn’t quite trust what she was saying, but he took that fist out of his pocket and relaxed it back into a hand again and held hers all the way down the hill. The hospital entrance was as impressive as she remembered, and because he still hadn’t let her go she followed him as he went to call the lift. He was utterly unconcerned with the whereabouts of any putative shop. He hardly bothered to look around at all, shooting her little glances every now and then that she only spotted out of the corner of her eye, and keeping his face turned to the floor for the rest of the time. The soul searching gazes of last night seemed to have gone searching for something else and the touch of his fingers was loose, giving her plenty of freedom to move away.  
  
In contrast, she scanned the wide hall for anyone she knew, completely sure that somewhere, the implausibly reincarnated Cassandra and her tattooed minion were watching. She’d have seen the Doctor arriving and recognised him straightaway and Rose herself would be of less interest as a potential body donor.   
  
This time, they stood together and waited for the lift, and because it seemed to be coming from the ends of the earth the Doctor had time to curve his thumb inside the gap between their fingers, and stroke her palm experimentally, just the once. She gave his hand a quick, hard squeeze, becoming very interested in her shoes for a brief moment, before he did it again. So casually it was obviously completely planned she glanced up at his face, catching his wink before she looked away again. He was humming whatever terrible tune the Barcelona marching band had been blasting out.   
  
The lift arrived, and he stepped smartly into it, dragging her with him, but she only let out the breath she was holding when it went up, and not down.   
  
‘Did I explain about the lifts, by the way?’ he asked, finally turning to her with a frown.   
  
She shook her head, and let go of his hand, moving to the other side of the box and away from the suspicious looking holes in the walls and ceiling next to him.   
  
‘Well, basic hygiene system,’ he said, and a jet of clearly cold water sloshed down onto his skull. ‘Wash and then blow dry.’  
  
From the other side of the lift she watched him try his best to maintain a dignified posture as water ran off the end of his nose and laughed as he gave up and put his coat over his head. ‘This is freezing,’ he complained, poking at the panel in an attempt to locate a temperature control.  
  
She didn’t find it so funny as about three buckets of water landed on her head, plastering her hair down and soaking her to the skin. He wasn’t joking about the freezing bit. ‘Where’s the hot tap?’ she yelled at him through the rushing noise of the water.  
  
He glanced at her again, and seemed to get a bit distracted, shrugging his coat back onto his shoulders and stabbing at the buttons behind him randomly.  
  
‘Hot. Tap,’ she yelled again.  
  
‘Hmmm?’ he answered, dropping his hand altogether and not quite meeting her eyes.   
  
Mercifully, the water stopped abruptly but he made no move to shake off the drips and just stood, transfixed. She looked up, behind her, and then down before she grasped what he staring at. White t-shirt. White bra. Freezing cold water. Not a great combination.   
  
A flush of embarrassment rushed to her face and she went to cover herself up, but he followed every move she made. There was almost enough heat in his gaze to start drying out her top all on its own and she could feel his eyes lingering over every dripping curve of her breasts. Watching him watching her she felt an entirely different sort of heat beginning to build, and she yanked the t-shirt taut, taking a step towards him. He seemed to be breathing a bit faster, there was a touch of red about his face and his mouth was ever so slightly open. The sodden material clung to every line of her chest and she knew he’d be able to see exactly how hard her nipples were through the fabric. She imagined those lips opening, closing around her in the darkness, the relief he could bring to her aching flesh, the speed of his tongue as it flicked across her skin, the sucking warmth behind his teeth. She swallowed, saw him do the same.   
  
‘What do you think: Miss Wet T-shirt five billion and twenty three?’  
  
He was utterly shameless. ‘If I’m judging, you’re winning,’ he said faintly, not removing his eyes for a second.   
  
She took another step closer, and another, until chill leather rubbed against the delicate little points poking though her top, and his gaze transferred from her breasts to her mouth, She remembered suddenly that whatever else might happen in this adventure, last time there had been kissing, and she really couldn’t object to a little bit of history repeating.   
  
His eyes were hooded, intense, with a direct line on her mouth that seemed to be dragging his head down slowly, slowly, like he was fighting against temptation and he knew he was going to lose. His hands came up, hovering around her shoulders in preparation for the crushing embrace that would mark their first proper kiss. She leaned into him, arching upwards to close the gap and hurry him forward. A puff of powder and then the blowers rushed on with a click, slapping her hair all over her face, breaking the tension in a strong wave of hot air that forced her to step back. She was sure she actually heard a strangled groan forced between his teeth. She didn’t look in his direction again until she was dry although she could see him in her peripheral vision leaning against the wall with his arms folded, shaking his head.   
  
She was first out of the lift and onto the ward, heading straight for the Face of Boe before she realised she should be a bit more artless about it. But she needn’t have worried, because he was so interested in exactly what diseases all the other patients had, reading charts and doing sneaky scans when he thought he could get away with it, and bothering the nurses for exactly how all the cures had been manufactured, using what techniques, that she’d been standing around for at least twenty minutes before he arrived. It was one of the perils of having a mechanically minded man in tow, she thought. The thoroughness could be thoroughly annoying.   
  
She wasn’t really surprised when they didn’t get the message they’d come for and it took only enough time for her to stop and tie up her shoelace in front of the big computer for him to start playing around with it. Before she was quite sure how one thing had led to another, they were inside intensive care and trying to count the rows and rows of green capsules, stretching in lines out of sight like the unopened doors of some giant advent calendar. He popped one open, scanned the occupant, and was suitably horrified.   
  
She’d been thinking about this though. ‘Let them out,’ she suggested.  
  
He looked at her like she’d gone mad. ‘Don’t be stupid. They’d infect everyone they touched. They’d be walking plague carriers. Everyone in the hospital would die.’  
  
‘Alright then,’ she replied. ‘Just reverse the programme. Infect them with every cure the computer knows how to make while they’re still in their pods and then let them out.’  
  
The look she was getting now had ‘you are criminally insane’ written all over it. ‘Is that your idea of an actual, workable, save the world type plan then?’ he asked incredulously, straightening up and coming to stand within inches of her.   
  
She was disappointed. ‘More like a suggestion than a plan really, just a thought, didn’t mean it, ignore it if you want.’  
  
He was shaking his head again as he made for the exit, his words trailing behind him, along with a crestfallen Rose Tyler. ‘And they said it couldn’t be done. Most of the time, I believed them. Feels like I’m hitting my head against a brick wall for days on end and I nearly give up, and then, lo and behold, out of nowhere, out comes a bona fide Good Idea. Who would have thought it? A proper plan. A great plan. Possibly even a fantastic plan if it involves getting back to the TARDIS for lunch.’  
  
Most of the last part of the monologue was delivered while tapping commands into a commandeered terminal and there was a sudden blaring alarm from the cavern behind her as his actions took effect.   
  
He was still ranting to himself. ‘Genius. No other word for it. Mix all the cures together and fix all the sickness in one go. And I thought I was supposed to be the doctor.’  
  
She couldn’t tell him that she’d just added a bit to his original idea, and that the genius was all his. She thought he’d explode with smugness if he found that out, although if he carried on like this, she’d start to feel a bit guilty.   
  
‘Maybe you should get a different outfit and try being the nurse?’ she suggested, getting a dirty look for her pains.  
  
With a crash the cell doors slammed open and the corridor behind them began flooding with new sort-of human life. Through the increasingly panicky crowds that started to mill around the hospital she caught a glimpse of Chip heading in their direction. Cassandra had obviously given up waiting and decided to come and have a look for herself. Rose hurried the Doctor off down the opposite hall.  
  
‘Maybe that alarm woke up the Face?’ she explained, hauling him along with an urgent tug on his arm.   
  
Their dilettante correspondent was indeed awake, although there was an almost puzzled expression on his face, which was lucky, because he didn’t have anywhere else to be puzzled. ‘I thought you would look different,’ he remarked, before launching into his fabulous ‘I called, but I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say, I’ll have a think and get back to you’ speech.   
  
This Doctor was underwhelmed. There were frequent mutterings to the effect that ‘with a head that size you’d think he could have fitted in a bit more memory’ and ‘can you get psychic paper with an answering service’ and ‘I’ve got a different jumper on, I look completely different, and who takes fashion tips from an alien without a body anyway’. She was far too concerned about getting out without bumping into Cassandra to answer.  
  
Halfway back up the hill though, with the sun shining easy in the sky again, and a day behind her in which everyone had, in fact, lived, she thought she’d probably got the God question covered. Emphasis on the probably. She’d achieved a lot of saving, there were loads of people standing around complaining now who should be dead, and it didn’t seem to have caused the universe to explode quite yet. God should be pleased. It was definitely possible to fiddle with time and not end up with a sticky mess all over your hands. She hoped so anyway, searching the ground for a four leaf clover.   
  
Except that if you looked at the big picture, say, the sort of picture you’d get if you were looking down from the heavens, you’d notice a new species, a delivered message, and an evil arch nemesis who was probably walking around on somebody else’s last legs anyway. The only thing that hadn’t happened was the kissing. The fact that the Doctor was now actively strolling up the hill, whistling without a care in the world, rubbing her skin with the ball of his thumb at regular intervals and giving her frequent sidelong glances, made her fairly certain that the kissing wasn’t too far behind. The thought made her legs shake just a bit.   
  
If she was lucky, if she hoped with all her strength, and if she’d changed enough on new New Earth, werewolves and dinner ladies and the French would play no part in her future whatsoever. She wouldn’t miss the croissants.   
  
At the top of the hill next to the TARDIS they stopped, and turned to admire the view. It had that sort of ‘peaceful chaos’ air about it that places often got after a visit from the Doctor — the immediate danger was gone, but there was usually an awful lot of clearing up to do.   
  
He surveyed the consequences of his actions serenely. ‘So — picnic?’ he asked.  
  
She had to wait for a while before he produced the standard issue tartan rug and wicker basket, but afterwards, lying on her back sunbathing with a glass of wine in her hand, she decided to rate it as nine out of ten.   
  
He’d been staring at her for at least half an hour. Lying on his side, his head braced on his hand, sunshine casting his features into shadow, so close she could almost feel his breath on her face. Staring, and not bothering to hide it. Staring, with something powerful enough to be terrifying stripped bare behind his eyes. Staring, like she was the only thing he ever wanted to see.  
  
She was ignoring him. She’d decided that somewhere today, she’d stepped over the line from good intentions into lying and that was a step too far. She drew a deep breath. ‘There’s something you need to know.’  
  
He stopped her with a finger on her lips. ‘I was just thinking the same thing.’   
  
And he leaned down and kissed her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read my books The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer available now on Amazon.


	6. Chapter 6

The Doctor’s kiss was gentle, gentle and light, but it had the weight of two hearts and several centuries of loneliness behind it, and it felt like coming home. His open mouth brushed hers, once, twice only before he pulled away, searching her eyes for encouragement, rejection, response. She smiled. It seemed to be her standard response to him these days. She was still smiling as she dumped her glass, smiling, stretched up her hand to curve around his neck, and still smiling dragged him back down. She’d never been quite so sure of what she was doing in her entire life.   
  
His forearm resting flat on the grass above her head supported his weight, and he bent over her again. Exactly like home, she thought, when his lips met hers. That same feeling you got, as soon as you put your key in the lock, that everything was suddenly right, that everything was just like you were expecting it to be, familiar, comfortable. She knew this man, she knew that distinctive scent he had close up, she knew the rough feel of his skin, she knew the way he moved.   
  
His lips were firm, on top of hers, but not brutal, not demanding. He opened his mouth, just a bit, enough to let her know that he wanted her, but that the wanting could continue to wait until she was ready. She put both arms around his neck, relaxed into the kiss, and learnt the taste of his tongue as it dipped inside her, running round the edges of her lips, darting against her teeth, plunging down to fill her up and then drawing back. Inside again to find the roof of her mouth, stroking across it in side to side swipes, withdrawing and then rushing back in again. He probed the soft flesh of her cheeks, teased at her tongue as she drove it forward and slipped it inside his mouth. He tensed, but he allowed her in and she started exploring the parts of him she didn’t know, opening doors into unknown rooms.   
  
For a while they were politeness, and tenderness, and novelty with each other, but slowly, her confidence grew, and she wanted more. There was strength in her arms as she tightened them around him, and he shifted so that his body was angled across hers, and she could feel the hard wall of his chest pressing down against her breast. She arched up against the weight, and the first twinges of desire awakened between her legs. She kissed him harder. He buried his tongue in her warmth. Her mouth was as wide as it would go, and she was kissing him so forcefully that his stubble was a sandpaper lick at her skin. His breath came faster now, blowing hot on her cheek as his tongue wove hard patterns against the upward motion of hers.  
  
She was ready, she didn’t need him to wait. She’d been ready for months, and love and loss had just made the wanting more acute. With a few shallower flicks of his tongue he pulled away, and she saw him looking down at her. The intensity of his gaze flayed her soul.   
  
‘Come to bed with me,’ he said, and there was request, and command, and plea in his tone.  
  
Her heart turned over. She slid her hand up to stroke his cheek, saw him close his eyes, lean into her touch. She answered, ‘Yes.’  
  
Back on his feet in an instant, the clasp of his fingers drew her up and his arm was around her shoulders for the few steps over the threshold of the ship. The TARDIS’s green glow looked faintly menacing, after the clean brightness of outdoors, but right at the moment, the ship was just a fly in the ointment of romance and she wasn’t planning to listen to anything it had to say on the subject of safe sex. She wasn’t even sure that sex with any alien could be considered safe, yet here she was, halfway down the corridor to an extra-terrestrial’s bedroom, and all she could think about what the ‘extra’ bits could be.  
  
It was a very long walk, and one in which each step seemed to become slightly harder than the last, slightly more loaded with embarrassment, slightly closer to something different. He pushed open the door, and gestured for her to precede him into a very large room, in the middle of which was a very large bed, covered with a very large pile of junk.  
  
‘Ah,’ he noted. ‘And that was all going so well.’  
  
She shook her head in mock horror, wandering over to examine the buried mattress and throwing his quite red face a succession of appalled looks.  
  
‘Sorry — I thought you said come to bed, not come and have a look round my own personal scrapyard.’  
  
She picked up the edge of a sheet and watched a procession of parts roll onto the floor. This was absolutely the last time she was ever going to get involved with a mechanically minded man. A large cog landed very near her foot.   
  
She cast him a glare. ‘So, I take it you don’t use this much?’  
  
He came to stand next to her, gazing down at the mess sadly. ‘I couldn’t sleep last night, and I thought I’d try and mend the dishwasher. You don’t see many Daleks doing their own washing up, so I don’t see why I should.’  
  
She considered the value of plungers.  
  
‘And anyway,’ he continued. ‘I wasn’t expecting… well — you.’ He waved in her approximate direction but kept his eyes fastened on the pile of metal. ‘I thought after yesterday that you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near….here.’  
  
He gestured vaguely at the bed, and he still didn’t look at her. The sudden silence was so heavy, it would have taken a chainsaw, rather than a knife to cut it properly. Instead, she picked up an edge of the sheet, planted her foot against the side of the bed, and began to pull the lot onto the floor. He closed a hand around her wrist and she stopped instantly at the slight tremble in his fingers.  
  
He raised her head with his other hand under her chin and the vulnerability in the look he gave her knocked at least half a millennium off his age. ‘You do, don’t you? Want to be here?’  
  
He was trying to give her a choice back again, she saw, but his misplaced nobility just made her want to do him serious violence. She could have said, should have said, what she had done to be standing here on the point of holding him, kissing him, feeling his body enter hers for the first time. If there was ever something to make crossing timelines worthwhile, this was it.  
  
‘I never want to be anywhere else but with you,’ she said, and she meant it.  
  
He went for her mouth with a speed she thought was probably super-human, driving his tongue inside her with such a blistering furore of kisses that she couldn’t keep up. She closed her eyes to hide from the universe for just a little while and let him kiss her as hard as he wanted, contenting herself with pushing his coat off his shoulders, kicking her shoes away, fumbling with his belt. She only let in the light again when his lips released hers and he moved away, pulling all the covering sheets and metal off the bed in one go with a tremendous crash. She faced him, and swallowing down the self consciousness flaming in her cheeks, stripped off her t-shirt, and unhooked her bra, throwing them both down into an untidy pile.   
  
A few steps away he looked at her nakedness, exploring the exposed curves of her breasts with his eyes, and he didn’t seem to notice what he was doing as his jumper came off over his head and he stepped out of his trousers. With hands that were really, really shaking now, she undid her jeans, knowing that he was following every move intently, and wriggled out of them. She stood there, in the middle of a cold, uninviting room, in the middle of the afternoon, clad only in a small piece of lacy material while the Doctor probed her with a gaze that could have melted glaciers. That little something in his eyes had blossomed into an unmistakeable flame of desire, and more than just desire too, although that was a something that she didn’t dare name.   
  
His stare dropped from her chest, down her stomach and rested on the half covered hair at the top of her legs. She felt him looking as acutely as if his hands had been roving over her as well, and she was aware that her breasts were rising urgently as her breathing quickened. She wondered if he could see how damp that scrap of material was starting to get.   
  
He was all lean, wiry strength underneath his clothes, she saw at last, long straight lines, pale skin and muscle. Stripped of all that leather and denim and don’t-touch-me angst he looked at lot more accessible, more open, more willing to laugh. She noticed that parts of him, especially the part of him that was still camouflaged in his underwear, was willing to do a lot more than laugh. There was a circular, and spreading patch of wetness soaking through the fabric he was still wearing.   
  
She knew there would never be another moment quite like this. There would never be another time when they hovered with friends just behind them and lovers just ahead. Life didn’t have a rewind button, generally. She wasn’t sure if this was meant to be, if this fleeting pause was outside the fate that seemed to be controlling them, or just another part of it. She just hoped that the next moment would be as good as this one. She took half a step towards him, and he met her halfway with a surging rush that pressed her body into his. His hands were all over her, stroking her spine, trailing down her sides, kneading her bottom, and all the time he kissed her, and she threw her arms around his neck and did her best to kiss him back.  
  
She had her tongue firmly in his mouth when she felt one of his hands inching up, off her arm, over her shoulder and down onto her breast, and she relaxed her grip, bending backwards to let him touch her, sliding her palm down the clean planes of his back. His fingers locked around her flesh reflexively, pushing her breast up, hard, squeezing her tight and making her draw in a swift breath. She heard him moan then, and felt a quiver run through him as he buried his mouth against the side of her neck, his teeth just grazing the surface. She reached down, felt skin, and fabric, and dug her nails into the firm flesh of his backside. His thumb found her nipple, and he rubbed it, quick up and down movements that sent tingling electricity from every nerve he touched into the coil of pleasure gathering inside her.  
  
His other hand came round, his mouth let go of her neck, and he looked down at his hands, cupping her breasts, and back up to her face, drinking in the flushed tension in her expression.   
  
‘Rose.’ His lips formed her name, but there was hardly a whisper of breath behind them.   
  
She put both hands on his bottom, and accepted the battery of sensations assaulting her chest with a thrust of her hips against the hardness pushing between her legs. But she grabbed on too hard, and in compensating, he overbalanced, tumbling them both onto the bed in a tangle of ungainly arms and legs. She looked at him, half on top of her, her elbow wedged into his stomach, felt underneath her back to remove some sort of spanner.   
  
He put a hand over his eyes and groaned theatrically. ‘It was too good to be true. I knew it. An actual, living, breathing woman walks into my bedroom voluntarily and everything just falls to pieces. I’m sure this used to be easier.’  
  
She snorted, raised a finger in the air as he heaved himself off her, and she let him nudge her knees apart and settle himself comfortably between her thighs. ‘Rule number one. I’ll go to bed with you as many times as you like, but I am not sleeping with bits of the TARDIS.’ She threw the offending bit of metal across the room.  
  
He shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t worry about that,’ he said, taking a long, steady drag with his tongue that started at her throat and ended halfway down her stomach. ‘She doesn’t even like you at the moment, let alone want to get inside your knickers. Whereas I, on the other hand…’   
  
He trailed off, smiling while he pulled one of her breasts into his mouth, suckling on it hard, and his middle finger insinuated itself underneath her underwear and slid straight up inside her. She shot back up off the bed with a cry and he flexed the digit within, twisting it around, searching for the right spot. His finger came out a bit, and then forced its way back in smoothly, joined by a second and she heard herself moaning, deep in her throat and in the unseen, unheard place between her thighs the moan throbbed into an ache, and the ache into a wail. He transferred his nibbling, sucking attentions to the other nipple, impaling her on the fingers stretched out deep inside, out and in, in and out, with a deliberate tortuous slowness.   
  
‘Oh please,’ she panted, and his hands and his lips worked in tandem to bring her closer to climax. He paused, looked up, and she could see her nipple, wet and shining, caught in the u-shaped curve of his tongue, before he finished the upwards lick he was halfway through and left her quivering.  
  
‘Please, what?’ he asked, while the speed of his hand down her knickers increased and the room filled with wet sticky noises and the sound of her panting. He slowed, allowed her to breathe.  
  
‘Please,’ she begged.   
  
His head moved to her other breast and his teeth closed over the tight point that topped it, pulling back gradually, stretching out the skin until she was gasping before he let go.  
  
‘Please, what?’ he asked again, and she could feel the liquid warmth running out of her as the rhythm of his lost fingers mounted to an unbearable pace.  
  
‘Please, now,’ she shouted at him.  
  
Without another word he disengaged his hand, unceremoniously ripped off her knickers and his own underwear and with one long, unstoppable thrust, pushed his whole length inside her. She shuddered, thought it was over, shuddered and shook and quivered again, as soon as he moved even slightly. He was braced on his hands, looking down into her eyes, all of his long heat sunk inside her, stretching her, filling and joining with her and making them a part of each other.   
  
‘Rose,’ he said, the timbre of his voice threaded through with warm hints of passion.  
  
‘I love you,’ she answered simply, and he dropped his weight on top of her, gathering her to his chest, driving his hips against her faster and faster as she wound her legs around him. Deeper inside she felt him push, speed and skill combining in a powerful throb of ecstasy that just grew, the tighter she held him. Her head arched back, bands of pleasure wrapping her tight while his rigid arousal pounded into her body. His back was slippery with sweat against her hands and he was panting heavily with each heave of his shoulders. A taut agony of pleasure ripped through her groin, the swollen flesh rubbing inside her driving her into new torments. Her whole body shook uncontrollably in time to the dogged rhythm that never faltered, and the stream of encouragement he poured into her ear. His throaty murmur told her what he was doing to her, what he would like to do to her, what she was doing to him in return. She couldn’t hold onto it anymore, and with a wrench of heat between her legs, she came, and then came again as he called her name, his body rocking under her hands with the shakes of his own orgasm as he finally let go.  
  
Afterwards, he took his weight back, withdrew from her slick embrace and the wet patch beneath them, falling limply onto the bed beside her. She snaked her hand across his stomach, her head on his shoulder and he put his arm around her, dropped a kiss onto the top of her head.   
  
‘Rule number two,’ she said. ‘No one makes me beg. You are so going to pay.’  
  
There was laughter, and the bed shook as he stroked her hair. ‘Was that a threat? Remind me to be terrified in the morning.’  
  
She rolled over and put both her hands on his chest, resting her chin on top of them, beaming. ‘Ill have you know I am very scary.’  
  
He reached up to grab a pillow, put it behind his head. ‘Okay - what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’  
  
She considered him seriously. This was the worst thing she had ever done, and she was still right in the middle of doing it. She’d gone back in time by accident, but she hadn’t owned up to it and now she was trying her best to change the future for entirely selfish reasons. Worse still, she’d slept with him, and she’d told him she loved him at long last, but despite both those things she was fully intending to lie to him from now on. This was the worst thing she’d ever done by far. Just in case New Earth hadn’t just been a horrible chance but was part of a destiny that would end up with him going showjumping, she wasn’t going to confess, and she was going to lie and lie with a smile on her face. And she thought of her lucky number and wished upon a star and just hoped that fate and time and whatever else would be kind. Now she knew what it was to hold him in her arms and watch him come inside her she wasn’t going to let him go ever again. She was sure he’d find her scary, if he knew.  
  
‘The worst thing I’ve ever done,’ she repeated slowly. ‘Well, I laughed at a Time Lord once.’  
  
‘Oh yeah?’ he asked without much curiosity but with another smile. He took both her hands, and raised them above her head.   
  
‘Well,’ she started, as he rolled her over onto her back again and pinned her wrists against the pillows. ‘There’s me going to bed with an alien, and the only thing that was out of this world was just how rusty his parts were.’  
  
‘Nice,’ he replied, and very carefully, and exquisitely slowly, he entered her again. ‘Now let me hear you practice that begging.’ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read my books, The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer available now on Amazon on Kindle or in print.


	7. Chapter 7

She was cold. That was what brought her round. Cold and a little bit sick. She opened her eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling and listened to the deep, regular breathing beside her for a while. He hadn’t let her sleep until very, very late, and even then she’d had to physically kick him out of bed to go and fetch another set of blankets. She wrapped the flimsy material around herself more closely and winced a bit as she rolled over. Make that cold, sick and sore. But she had to smile as she watched him sleeping. The Doctor was lying flat on his back, his body stretched out in a cruciform pattern, totally oblivious to his complete nakedness as he snored. His face was relaxed, lost in whatever dreamworld he walked, defenceless, and with a boyish smile around the corners of his mouth that he never had when awake.   
  
She almost didn’t recognise him, not now, and not for most of the night she’d just spent in his bed. He was playful, he was a tease, he was a shocking flirt and he had an extremely filthy mind, none of which he’d ever given the slightest hint of in his daylight hours. She wondered if she was finally seeing him as he should have been, if the war and the trauma and whatever else hadn’t got in there first.  
  
She needed to find the bathroom though so she didn’t wake him up, picking her way across the metal strewn floor, biting her lip in pain when she stepped on some particularly spiky bit of machinery. Standing in the bathroom with the door closed, surveying the fragments of his solitary life discarded around her, she felt the nausea rising again. It looked like he’d taken an engine to pieces in the bath, and there were sadly neglected shaving products dumped in corners, along with assorted tools and circuits and miles of neatly stacked wiring.   
  
The room was typical of the man, she though, full of half completed things he’d been profoundly interested in and thoroughly excited by, before he’d left them behind and moved onto the next. Like he’d done to her, once upon a time. Although that really hadn’t been his fault, and the second time, really hadn’t been him. That wasn’t going to happen again though, either way, she decided grimly, fighting to hold onto the contents of her stomach. She refused to feel guilty for wanting to catch a chance of happiness when it was flung her way. Her conscience was, and was going to stay clear, even if she had to remind herself of that every single day. And in any case, this bathroom also showed that he hadn’t had any visitors, not in a long time, and hadn’t expected any either, and if she could snatch some happiness for him too that was all the better.   
  
She unhooked a musty smelling bathrobe from the back of the door, belted it up. Tonight, she promised herself, they were going to go to her room. He wasn’t in the bed when she got back to it, and taking that as the universally acknowledged hint for ‘it’s time to get up’ she got a bit lost on the way back to her own shower and ended up in the console room.   
  
He’d got there before her, along with a sackful of good mood, and by the sound of it, some singing. She stood and watched him tapping his foot in time to the music and thought about the truth. He was clearer to her this morning than he had ever been. She had learnt everything she needed to know, and he wouldn’t ever be able to hide behind the armour he wore like clothing again. For example, she thought, leaning against the doorframe, he didn’t have a ticklish bone in his body, and he hated her touching anywhere near his feet. But watching her go down on him made him very, very excited indeed, and there was a spot just underneath the head of his erection that he really liked to have licked. He had big hands and both his thumbs were ridged with calluses that could cause wonderful friction on a pair of aching nipples. He never, ever seemed to tire of looking at her when she came, but his own expression was almost one of pain, followed by an immediate contentment that lit him up from the inside.   
  
She guessed he already knew she was watching him. He looked over his shoulder, greeting her with, ‘Hello. I was just thinking about breakfast.’  
  
She looked round while he started across the room towards her, hoping for toast, at the very least, since croissants were still off the menu. Puzzled by a distinct lack of bread products she gave him a stare and was appalled by the glint in his eye and the determined set of his jaw. She recognised that too, and took off down the corridor at a run with a squeak of alarm. He was also fast though, and he caught up with her in a couple of easy strides, hoisting her over his shoulder in an effortless fireman’s lift. She sagged in his arms.   
  
‘But I’m not even dressed,’ she complained, and watched the metal grille of the floor as she was carried closer and closer to the console.  
  
‘Less to take off.’ He shrugged and dumped her unceremoniously on top of the control panel, loosening the tie of the bathrobe.  
  
‘I haven’t cleaned my teeth,’ she pointed out when he spread it wide, immediately followed by her legs.  
  
‘Then I won’t kiss your mouth,’ he promised with a threatening little smile.  
  
‘And I haven’t had a shower,’ she tried, although his head was dropping into position already and she knew there was no stopping him now.  
  
‘I like it when you’re dirty.’  
  
That was true too. He set his mouth to the very top of the gap between her legs and trailed a long, slow and above all thorough stroke all the way down and all the way back up again. There were some activities in which thoroughness was thoroughly exhilarating. Making sure she was watching he stuck out his tongue like a wedge and moved his whole head firmly from side to side, a technique which required no skill but was supremely effective. By the time she had finished digging her hands into the console in a search of something to hold onto, and was thrusting her hips in time to the pressure of his mouth, he’d resumed his trademark finesse. His eyes refused to let her look away as he located the exact, specific, perfect spot with the very tip of his tongue and flicked it up and down aggressively. She watched him lick her into orgasm, suck her into orgasm, nibble and bite and savour the succulent heart of her pleasure with a gaze that smiled and smiled at every moan she made. Even as the climax exploded between her legs he drew back, watching her whole body shake and licking shining lips in appreciation.   
  
‘Cup of tea?’ he offered, leaving her lying, still quivering, open to the world.   
  
She dropped, exhausted, onto her back and noticed the engine column of the TARDIS above her head move upwards, just the slightest bit.   
  
‘How was it for you?’ she asked the green light.  
  
Later, he went all out for fun. He said he was going to anyway. A whole day of fun, and fresh air, and frolics and lots of other less family friendly words that began with ‘f’. She’d never seen him so happy. There was a permanent smile in his eyes, like he was laughing to himself silently, and at regular intervals he’d take her hand and hold it, just for a second, before letting her go, humming all the while. She didn’t even consider saying no to anything he suggested.  
  
So they landed, and she went outside the doors first, and then came back in, closed them, and very deliberately, kicked the side of the TARDIS hard. Then she went off to find the nearest bathroom and be sick.  
  
He was still bemused, and worried when she returned. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘The scenery’s not too bad, even if it isn’t where I was going. Don’t you think it looks like Scotland?’  
  
‘I was hoping for somewhere different,’ was all the answer he was going to get.  
  
She cracked her knuckles. Time had upped the stakes, but she was playing to win. Bad wolf versus the werewolf, she thought, slightly hysterically. She hadn’t changed the future enough yet, she was still stuck repeating the same timeline she’d lived before and it looked a lot like the path in front of her was still leading towards horses and a nation of snail-lovers. That wasn’t an option she was going to put up with. Mentally, she checked that she hadn’t walked under any ladders, broken any mirrors or accidentally crossed behind any black cats and she hoped, with her nails dug deep into the palms of her hands, for a different fate. For a destiny she could control. For a universe that was kind. It was time to bite back.   
  
She could hear him vaguely from outside, hailing down whoever it was riding towards them, exchanging a few words, and his head poked back in through the doors.  
  
‘Hurry up, then,’ he said, extending his hand. She took it, and her answering grin was hard.   
  
Surrounded protectively by red coated solders they approached the familiar black carriage, with its already opened door.  
  
He whispered out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Marry me?’  
  
‘What?’ she asked, pressing closer.  
  
‘I said — marry me — quick.’  
  
Flabbergasted was a great word, she decided. Gobsmacked was even better. She gaped at him. He rolled his eyes skyward.  
  
‘We’re about to meet Queen Victoria. If you’re not my wife I won’t be able to touch you for the rest of the day without getting lynched and I’d rather go back to the TARDIS right now. So will you, Rose Tyler, do me the honour of becoming my wife? Quickly?’  
  
‘Ummm. Okay?’  
  
He tutted, fumbling in his pocket and sliding a ring onto her left hand. ‘Bit more enthusiasm might be nice. This is the happiest day of your life.’  
  
‘What’s this?’ she asked, examining the plain gold band incised with swirling patterns that was now sitting comfortably on her finger.  
  
‘Spare bio-damper. Always good for a wedding emergency.’  
  
And smoothly, he introduced himself to the Empress of India and the Defender of the Faith. ‘And this is my wife, Rose Tyler,’ he added.  
  
She curtseyed, just to hide her smile. The Queen was suitably impressed by the psychic paper’s phoney credentials, and with a wave of her hand invited the beaming Doctor Tyler and his wife to accompany her to the Torchwood Estate. Rose trailed along behind the rocking carriage, struggling to walk for laughing. She poked him in the ribs, with the hand that wasn’t still being held in his.  
  
‘See, I told you it wasn’t so difficult. Nobody cares what your name is, as long as you’ve got one, and now you’ve got mine.’  
  
He smiled, swung their hands backwards and forwards in the air. ‘If you ever tell your mother I’ll get a divorce,’ he promised.   
  
‘Could you even split the TARDIS in half though? And I’d want maintenance. I’ve had a lot to put up with.’  
  
They were bickering about the terms of the settlement when they entered the courtyard and Sir Robert MacLeish delivered his stilted greeting. Rose noticed that the monks were already there, which meant that most of the household staff was currently being held prisoner and their caged alien wasn’t far away. It was time to put another plan into action. All she had to do was make a scene. Kick up a right royal fuss. Accuse Sir Robert of being a traitor to the crown, suggest she’d heard about a plot, send the soldiers to poke around a bit and insist they go on to the next estate. Just take the Doctor, and everyone else and walk away, and leave these mad tartan strangers to be devoured by the werewolf.  
  
People would die. People had died before, but more would be killed this time, and the werewolf would remain a danger for centuries. That would certainly change the timeline. But why should she care if people she didn’t know died, as long as the ones she loved, the one she loved, lived? It was her best hope.  
  
She opened her mouth, took a deep breath. The Doctor nudged her side, gazed down at her with a question when she glanced at him. He tucked her hand through the crook of his arm and she could see the wedding ring sparkling like a band of bright flame against the darkness of his coat.   
  
He was proud of her. She realised he was actually proud of being with her. Standing there, arm in arm, being introduced with her mundane human name and not minding, one half of a couple, acknowledged to the world. It was ordinary, normal, everyday, domestic, and brilliant, a sparkle-cut shimmering effigy of sheer brilliance at the same time. He was proud of her. She couldn’t let him down. Not even if that meant losing him. He couldn’t see a problem and then just walk away, he was continually trying to fix things, mend things, make things better. A mechanically minded man. She couldn’t walk away either, no matter what her hopes. So she closed her mouth, followed him into the house, and tried to think of another way out.  
  
The sickness churned away in her guts. The mansion was large, and the tour extensive, and she’d never been all that bothered by pictures of people’s long dead relations anyway. She’d also seen the library before, and most of the corridors, going past in a blur of running. Only the observatory held any real interest. So interesting did this Doctor find the telescope that even poor, doomed Sir Robert and Queen Victoria left him to go and dress for dinner.   
  
‘I can’t understand it,’ he said again, squinting into the eyepiece and stepping back to spin a few dials. ‘It’s obviously been made well, and someone’s done all the right calculations but it won’t focus. I wonder if there’s any schematics or anything.’  
  
She was sitting on the floor as he fiddled, playing with her laces and considering the subject of doom. It was a day for big thoughts. She had singularly failed to walk away from the problem, which probably meant that unless she did something drastic soon Lady Isobel was going to end up a widow. But, she could always tell doomed Sir Robert about the whole doom issue, and see what happened. What would you do if you knew you were facing death? Run away from it? Refuse to put up with it and try to change the future? Or accept it and try to make every last minute you had left count? If time was fixed, immutable, caught in an endless procession of things that were meant to be, was there any room for choice, or hope, or love? What would Sir Robert do? What would she do, for that matter? What would the Doctor do?   
  
She had purposefully taken that choice away from him. He had no idea that he’d died, been regenerated and then jumped through a mirror on a horse. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d just guess. Plus, he didn’t know she’d brought him back, or that time was following them around like an annoying younger brother, and the more she tried to run away from it, the more it clung on. She let the nightmare scenario that twisted her stomach every time she thought about it have a little more airspace.   
  
She was stuck in the timeline, part of events, and eventually, she’d be stuck on board a spaceship on her own, when the Doctor made the same decision as last time, jumped back in time and left her. And what would she do then? Get back in the TARDIS, hit emergency programme one for a second time and try to do things differently. Maybe leave the Daleks to kill him this time, or let Cassandra pilot his body to the stars. It was a loop she could go round and round and round. Or, she could tell him, and he would go back and sacrifice himself. He wasn’t the sort to see a problem and then just walk away. Whatever choice she made, he’d be lost. It was like she was tied to the life she’d led with her pinstriped Doctor in that first, and clearly stronger timeline. She was a car on tow, a kite on a string, a horse on a long rein — however far she went she kept being tugged back to that original set of events.   
  
She loved him too much to let him go. There had to be another solution to death. Fate had to smile sometimes and turn her head. The universe had to allow just a spark of hope occasionally.   
  
He came to sit next to her, his brow furrowed in thought. ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked finally, but she could tell he wasn’t expecting much from her reply.  
  
She decided to put him out of his misery. ‘Looks like a microscope to me. But it’s lost its lens.’  
  
He gave her another one of his wide eyed stares, planted a smacking kiss on her forehead. ‘Genius,’ he said. ‘I knew there was a reason I married you.’  
  
He got to his feet to resume tinkering, but she pulled his sleeve. ‘Stop playing with your toys. We’ll be late for dinner and I need to get changed.’  
  
‘Yes dear,’ he said. ‘Sorry dear. Coming dear.’  
  
He got a slap for that.   
  
A monk who was only slightly less lost than they were opened the door into a dark, wood panelled room with an enormous four poster bed. She was busy checking the wardrobes for hidden maids when she was interrupted by a loud cough behind her. She turned. He wasn’t in the room. In fact, he was still in the corridor, and staring rather significantly at the threshold.   
  
‘You’re not taking this seriously,’ he complained, with a mock disappointed face. ‘This is our wedding night. There’re traditions to think about.’  
  
She sighed, went back out into the corridor and jumped into his outstretched arms. ‘Will that do?’  
  
He carried her over the doorway again, kicked the wood closed behind them, and laid her face up on the bed, prostrating himself beside her and taking her left hand in his. He held up the wedding ring to the light, admiring the glow of the gold in the dim radiance.   
  
‘So, what’s the matter?’  
  
She gave him a shifty look out of the corner of her eye. ‘Nothing. Why should there be anything the matter?’  
  
‘You’ve been quiet since we got to the house,’ he observed. ‘Is it this?’ He waved the hand with the ring on it around a bit more, rolled over on his side to look at her. ‘I just kind of assumed last night wasn’t a one off. But the ring’s only a joke, and if we’re going too fast, then…’   
  
She stopped him, shaking her head. ‘It’s not that. Last night was…fine. All this is…fine. I just don’t feel well, that’s all.’  
  
‘Fine,’ he repeated. ‘Only fine.’ He tightened his grip on her hand. ‘You know you can talk to me about anything don’t you? Well, almost anything, not split ends, or mascara, or shoes and stuff, but anything else.’  
  
She read the concern in his eyes, and all the suffocating tide of stronger emotions that the concern was surfing on top of. She felt an overpowering need to confess, just to tell him everything. She was ashamed of lying — and it was much too hard. She couldn’t be expected to save the day and save him too, all on her own. Her stomach rumbled.  
  
‘Nothing to tell,’ she said, and distracted him by getting undressed; fending off his wandering hands as she put on a tight blue dress she found hanging in the wardrobe.   
  
Dinner was a dull affair. Dull, but mercifully, short. Almost as soon as she sat down she brought up the subject of the Queen’s mysterious property and amazed the entire room by guessing that it was the Kohinoor. When she was sure she’d planted the seed of an idea in the Doctor’s head, she left the room to powder her nose. Gunpowder her nose.   
  
The only thing she knew about werewolves was that you killed them with silver bullets. Technically, she didn’t have any silver, but then it wasn’t technically a werewolf either.   
  
She searched the corridors until she found a drugged soldier, snatched up his rifle, ran for the cellar. It was surprising she thought, just how much less people complained about doing what they were told when you had a gun in your hand. The captives fled to freedom and she approached the small, scared boy hiding in his wooden cage. It’s not a boy, she told herself, it’s a wolf, just shoot it. The boy looked at her with his midnight eyes, reminded her silently that he was unarmed.   
  
She tried getting angry. ‘Right you,’ she started. ‘I don’t care what you are, and where you're from, and I don’t want to know about your plan to take over the world, because I’ve heard it all before.’   
  
She raised the rifle to her shoulder and pointed it at his head, although her hand was shaking and she wasn’t sure what would happen if she pulled the trigger.   
  
‘Now be a good doggy, and show me how you play dead.’  
  
She tried to move her finger. He still wasn’t a wolf; he was still a defenceless child in a cage. She couldn’t do it. This was murder. Her Doctor would be disappointed. Still with her, but he wouldn’t be proud of her anymore because she’d let him down. Her hand dropped.   
  
The voice from behind her was even, level. ‘Rose, what are you doing?’  
  
She wasn’t surprised to hear him, not even remotely shocked to discover he’d found the right room. Locked in an internal battle between conscience and wayward hope, she gestured at the cage, hearing herself speak from far away. ‘It’s a werewolf. I have to kill it.’  
  
‘How do you know it’s a werewolf?’ the Doctor asked, very, very calmly, and in a hypnotic tone that made her long to reply.  
  
The boy answered before the truth came tumbling out. ‘You burn like the sun, but all I require is the moon.’  
  
She snapped out of her reverie. Aimed the gun.  
  
‘No, Rose!’ he shouted. ‘Stop.’   
  
She shot the lock off the cage. ‘You want the Queen? You want the world? Fine. Heel.’  
  
The thing began to change, finally forcing its way through the bars of the cage in a ball of snarling fury. She picked up her skirts, and checking it was behind her, raced from the room.   
  
‘Love, honour and obey,’ yelled the Doctor after her. ‘What happened to obey?’  
  
She knew the building well enough now to lead the thing on an extended chase, to give the Doctor enough time to get the idea, get the stone and get to the telescope. Unfortunately, whenever she tried to turn down deserted corridors people kept getting in the way and the thing made sure they’d never get in the way of anyone ever again. A soldier, the steward, poor doomed Sir Robert, who the universe really seemed to have a grudge against. At last, she made it gasping up the stairs, through the door, flung herself to the floor immediately behind it. With the Doctor working the machine, the world was shortly minus one werewolf.   
  
He ignored the dumbstruck monarch, and helped Rose up off the floor instead with one hand wrapped overly tightly around her upper arm. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Now answer the question. What’s going on? How did you know it was a werewolf?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is a synopsis of my book The Postman's Daughter, available now on Amazon, if you fancy reading something quite a lot like Five and a Half Hours:
> 
> Late in 1916, in a London menaced by the threat of German attack, Ivy Drummond is rescued from an air raid by a stranger who knows both when and where the bombs will fall. Will Rawlings – sent home from the front and suffering from shellshock – is tortured by nightmares and hallucinations. Will believes he can see the future. Ivy believes he needs medical help. But when Will’s visions start coming true Ivy is torn between family, duty, honour and love.


	8. Chapter 8

He was hurting her arm. Plus, his eyes were shooting sparks at her, and he was more angry than she’d ever seen him in her life. With this Doctor, you always had to be prepared for the shouting. She cast around for an excuse.  
  
‘The same way it knew me. The call of the wild maybe. I could just feel something as soon as we got inside the house but I wasn’t sure what it was.’  
  
Gazing up at him with her eyes wide, deliberately unblinking, and she pasted the most innocent expression she could locate at short notice onto her face. That was actually a pretty good lie. She was getting pretty good at lying to him, she noted, with a little run of sadness that made her lower lip wobble. He squeezed her arm a bit more, but he seemed slightly less furious and he turned away from her to face the Queen.  
  
‘Excuse me Ma’am; there are matters of personal security I need to discuss with my wife in some detail. Goodnight.’  
  
He gave a little bow, and escorted Rose none too gently from the room, propelling her down corridors and up stairs with a hand crushing her elbow. Only ever so slightly less furious then. He slammed the door to their bedroom closed, and span her round to face him, leaving her to rub the feeling back into her arm.  
  
‘How could you be so irresponsible?’ was his opening line, delivered in a hiss that quickly escalated in volume. ‘I told you to stop, but you don’t need to listen to me any more do you? You just take off with some enormous monster after you and a great big sign saying ‘chase me.’ What if I hadn’t worked out that machine? What if I’d been wrong?’  
  
She tried to calm him down. ‘Oh come on — funny looking telescope, Queen’s husband with a suspicious fascination for diamonds? I’ve travelled with you long enough to spot a saving the world clue when I see one. And besides, I’ve never seen a machine you couldn’t work out.’   
  
She smiled winningly. Sadly, his ego hadn’t returned from its last ego trip and flattery wasn’t working. He came closer, and now he was raising his voice right into her face. ‘Yeah, but it didn’t occur to you that I might need an explanation, did it? You just ran off. Put yourself in danger. You could have been killed and there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.’  
  
His face was a bit pink now, what with all the effort he was putting into the yelling. He made her feel guilty, and childish, and thoughtless too, for not considering his needs enough. Then anger, sudden and wild and devouring flashed across her face like a rash. The only thing she was thinking about was his need not to be dead or lost, and he was shouting at her loudly enough to wake up the people in the next estate, let alone the next room. She had so much responsibility it was making her sick, and as she stood there quivering with fury, she remembered that he’d never had the shouting at he deserved.  
  
She clenched her fists, narrowed her eyes. ‘Because, of course, you’d never do that.’  
  
He frowned, snapped, ‘What?’  
  
‘Just dump me and run. You’d never catch the mighty great Time Lord swanning off without a word. Course not. That’s just what us stupid humans do.’  
  
He straightened up a bit and his face was now white.   
  
She folded her arms. ‘How did it go? Oh yeah — this is emergency programme one — blah blah blah — hope it’s a good death — see you round.’ She was so angry she had to dig her nails into the palms of her hands to stop herself crying, or slapping him.   
  
She could see him building up to a tirade, his eyes like fiery coals beneath his brows, and his lips thinned into compressed lines of rage. ‘I had no choice.’ His tone was icy, bitter. ‘I had to keep you safe. I’d do it again if I had to.’  
  
That was the final straw. He was asking for it. ‘You left me,’ she screamed, losing control entirely. ‘How could I have a fantastic life? How guilty did you want me to feel? You were just making it easier on yourself. What about what I wanted? What happened to my explanation? Why do you always leave me behind?’  
  
He had advanced until his face was only inches away, his neck corded with tension, and his voice was so loud she was deafened. ‘I love you. I was saving your life.’  
  
All she could see was red rage. ‘I love you too. I was saving yours.’  
  
He hollered back with a slightly lower pitch. ‘So you did mean what you said last night then.’  
  
‘Of course I did,’ she howled, but her anger was cracking. ‘Don’t you mean it too?’   
  
‘From the bottom of my heart;’ he yelled. ‘So it counts twice.’  
  
‘Fine,’ she snapped.  
  
‘Fine,’ he retorted.  
  
She glared at him. He glared at her.  
  
The corner of his mouth twisted. ‘Up against the wall?’ he suggested.  
  
She nodded. ‘It’d take ages to get this dress off.’  
  
His mouth was on hers, and his tongue was halfway down her throat before she knew what had hit her, stumbling back against the wall as both pairs of hands struggled to lift her heavy skirts. He tossed the fabric up over her chest and she felt his fingers digging into the warm hollow between her legs. His hand shifted and he picked up her thigh, holding her steady as he thrust his hot, strong arousal up inside her. She straightened with a cry, grabbed his shoulders and held on for dear life, feeling him pull back and enter her again and again, with a demanding, unmerciful intensity that slammed her hips against the wall. He was fast, and he used all his weight to drive, deep and throbbing within her, rubbing her raw with the friction, leaving her with only a tiptoe on the floor for support. Brutal, rough, animal sex, the real call of the wild.   
  
She’d never been taken harder. No one had ever forced their way inside her with such complete abandon, no one had ever given themselves to her so totally, with no holding back, no fear, no limits. It only didn’t hurt because she trusted him enough to utterly relax, and he only did it because he knew he had her trust.   
  
His body thrashed against hers, out of control, unselfconscious and he tore his mouth away, pouring out a torrent of ‘ohs’ and grunts and husky cries while he hammered away between her thighs. She felt like she was burning, her hips engulfed in a sharp flame of passion, stoked by the fierce push-push-push of the penetration going on below. She held him tight, and she ached to come, she panted to come, she spread her legs wider to make herself come as quick and as hard and as strong as she possibly could. He forced her on, locked within the dripping heat she had become, rushing to bury himself within her as many times as he could stand before he had to let go.   
  
Wrapped up in her overwhelming need for orgasm she only just felt him speed up, struggle through a few stokes so powerful they pushed her completely off the floor and then he was shouting in her ear and shuddering under her hands, while her fingers locked convulsively into his shoulders and a blistering climax spiked her groin. Her knees were actually trembling when he put her down.  
  
She had to sit on the bed with her heart racing for some time while he unhooked the back of her dress and pulled it off. The rest of the night she spent lying naked in the Doctor’s arms. Waking, dozing, listening to him breathe, sighing herself into a dizzy cloud of pleasure when he ran his fingers over her body, making love to her with gentle care and an attention that took hours to exhaust. Every time she came he said ‘I love you’ and his words were a satisfaction that lingered, long after the physical reaction had died away. The something that had hidden in the shadow of his eyes was standing in the sunshine now, the love he felt open and on display every time he looked her way.   
  
He said, ‘I’m sorry I left you. I’ll try not to do it again.’  
  
‘Promise?’ she asked.   
  
He didn’t know how important his answer was. She hoped it would be enough.   
  
She was woken in the damp chill of the Scottish morning by a missed call on her phone and Mickey’s number. She got up to find the bathroom and returned wiping her mouth.   
  
He stared at her, a sudden frown creasing his brow. ‘Have you just been sick again?’ he asked.  
  
She had to reply truthfully: ‘Third morning this week.’  
  
Hope like lightening arced across his face, followed immediately by confusion and denial. Digging out the sonic screwdriver from his jacket strewn across the floor he ran it over her, checked the readout, muttered, ‘Idiot,’ under his breath.  
  
She shrugged, ‘Must be something I ate.’  
  
She threw the phone into the pile of clothing on the floor, refusing to think about it anymore, and made herself breakfast. She’d heard that revenge was a dish best served cold, but she found it was best eaten warm, and sticky, and shot into the mouth at high velocity by a man promising faithfully never to make her come while lying on the console ever again. In fact, she made him promise so many times, with her tongue teasing that sensitive spot underneath his smooth, shining, dribbling head, that his knees were trembling against the bedsheets when he finally filled her throat with his thick release.  
  
She didn’t mind not being knighted, and it was quite a relief to creep out of the house at first light, and start the long walk back to the TARDIS. She didn’t take off the ring. He didn’t ask for it back.  
  
So far, time was beating her two to nothing, and despite the everlasting support of the Doctor’s hand clasped around hers there was a bundle of nerves lodged in her guts that wouldn’t go away. In the evening, she drowned it with very strong cider, and covered it with chips, and fish, and tomato sauce, salt and vinegar and half a pickled egg, before she realised what she was eating and spat it out. It had amused her to send him to his room after lunch, with instructions to tidy it up, and a big box of cleaning products wrapped up in his favourite apron. True to form, he’d been gone for hours. She suspected the engine in the bath would be a lot more reassembled when she saw it again, although the bath itself was unlikely to be any cleaner.   
  
She wanted some quiet time alone with the TARDIS, for some girl on girl — or girl on box — action. Or round two, she wasn’t sure which. She needed help. She was looking at death, probably not her own, but the total loss of the Doctor, and that felt like a little piece of her heart was dying with every minute that brought it nearer. A merciless fate was staring her in the face and as far as she could see, there were only three options — run, fight, or accept it. She wasn’t being allowed to run — the farthest they’d got from the original timeline was Barcelona, and she suspected that was only because it had been on his mind so much before he regenerated. Fighting hadn’t helped a lot either. She’d tried to make different choices, but abandoning innocent people, or even murdering not so innocent ones wasn’t part of who she was, not part of the person he loved. But she couldn’t just lie down and let time walk all over her either. A keening wail echoed in her mind any time she thought of being without him and her body was imprinted with his touch, so that even when he walked away she could feel him holding her hand.   
  
She didn’t know what to do. She wanted a better answer, or a better plan than clicking her heels together three times and hoping for the best. Even though that hope was about the only weapon she seemed to have.   
  
Her concept of how to access the ship’s databanks was flimsy at best, involving telepathy or something else flash and alien, but she also remembered that the TARDIS was frequently fixed with a rubber mallet, and had a bicycle pump as a key component. Mickey had a point about ET’s dustbin.   
  
So she rescued the keyboard from underneath a new pile of junk and typed as if his life depended on it. ‘Timelines’ got more responses than she could have read in a lifetime, and the majority were incomprehensible. ‘Change future’ was the same, although there looked to be a lot more philosophy than temporal mechanics in that set of answers. She narrowed the search, tried looking for something specific on wounds or windows in time, Reapers, space/time vortex, or even what the ‘relative’ bit actually did mean. It was like looking for a needle buried under a haystack on a different planet. Eventually, she typed in ‘crossing’ by mistake instead of ‘crossing timelines’ and was rewarded with over a thousand varieties of the ‘why did the chicken cross the road’ gag. She had at least found the TARDIS’ sense of humour, and the ship was laughing at her. Revenge was definitely a dish best served cold, she realised, and there was nowhere colder than space. Or Dimension(s) In Space. She gave up, typed a mouthful of extremely rude words into the terminal and went off to find the only answer she trusted.  
  
When she spoke, the Doctor looked up at her guiltily from the floor of the bathroom, a smear of oil staining his cheek. ‘What — now? Right this minute?’ he asked.  
  
‘You said fun.’ She waved the wedding ring at him. ‘Love, honour and obey. And take me dancing. And feed me chips.’  
  
So they went to Sheffield.   
  
Sheffield in 1979 was a dump. Sheffield on November 22nd 1979 was particularly awful, especially when Ian Dury had played the night before and they’d missed him. She’d pleaded for ABBA, or the Jackson Five, or something else cheesy and fun, but he’d only compromise as far as the Beatles or Elvis and she wasn’t in a good enough mood to put on the outrageous pink skirt she’d found in the wardrobe room. She knew it would be Sheffield anyway.   
  
She found the nearest off licence to the venue because she wanted alcohol, just to take the taste of her desperation away, and she found the nearest chip shop to the off licence, because nothing she ate seemed to be staying down. And then, because it was raining, she found the nearest bus shelter to the chip shop and she sat, surrounded by grey depression and waterlogged, storm lashed streets, and tried to think of a way to ask a question that was nearest to what she really wanted to know.  
  
Waving around the pickled egg, she said, ‘So, what’s to stop us coming back yesterday and doing this again?’  
  
He picked at the ancient chewing gum stuck to the plastic seat beside him. ‘Nothing. If you want to do this again.’  
  
She sidled a bit nearer to the unanswered question. ‘And what’s to stop us coming back again, if the gig’s any good?’  
  
He pulled his coat around him against the cold, and shrugged. ‘Can’t have two of us in the same place at the same time. You know that.’  
  
She approached the question from behind, got right up close. ‘And why can’t you go back into the middle of last week and warn them?’ She took a bite of the pickled egg to camouflage her interest in his answer.   
  
He frowned, grinding someone else’s discarded cigarette end beneath his boot. ‘What — go back and warn ourselves not to bother? Good idea.’  
  
She spat out the egg. ‘No, with the Daleks. You said you couldn’t go back and warn anyone because you’d be caught in events.’ She tapped the question on its shoulder and waited for it to look round.  
  
‘Well, I couldn’t because I’d be stuck. Say I jumped back a couple of days, and told somebody what was going to happen. Time would just go on for a bit, and things would change, but eventually the paradox would catch up. Or something like the Reapers would get in first. I already know what’s going to happen, but if I skip back and change the timeline, the part where I find out what happened never existed. So I can’t go back and warn anyone because I don’t know anything, because it never happened. But I’ve already done it, so it’s a circle — see?’  
  
He looked at her doubtfully. The cider fizzed comfortingly in her mouth.   
  
‘I’m stuck in events. After a couple of days I’ll get to the same point in time I started from and I’ll have to go back and warn everyone all over again. I’m in a loop, I can just go round and round but I’m stuck.’  
  
She stared the question right in the eye. ‘Yeah, but the first timeline never happened, so no one needs warning anyway. And what if you don’t go back?’  
  
He looked at her seriously. ‘The first timeline still exists. By going back, I’ve made a new timeline, but it’s like a parasite on the back of the first one — the first one creates it, dominates it. You can’t have the second without the first. That’s why you can’t change your own history without risking things going bad, getting stuck in events, or a parallel universe, or completely annihilating yourself, or anything. But if I don’t go back, if I don’t warn anyone, the first timeline just snaps back into place and all I get is a nasty headache.’  
  
She asked it. ‘So how do you break the circle? How do you change the timeline and keep it changed?’  
  
All her hopes, everything she wanted, her very existence hung on his answer.  
  
‘You can’t. Unless…’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read my novels The Postman's Daughter and The Car Crash Bride by Sally Anne Palmer available now on Amazon digitally or in print.


	9. Chapter 9

What a wonderful, marvellous fantastic language that had the word ‘unless’ in it, she thought. With the Doctor, there was always a saving the world type plan lurking somewhere at the back of his brain, even when he pretended there wasn’t. Things could get as bad as things could possibly get, and then he’d start in with the ‘unless’. She really didn’t care about all the other doom and gloom and more doom things he’d said, because there was that shiny, sparkling ‘unless’ tacked on the end. She pinned her hopes to the back of the ‘unless’ and waved it in the face of destiny, and time, and the pitiless universe, and all the other icy certainties that were choking the love and the life that had flared into being when the Doctor kissed her.   
  
Unfortunately, that ‘unless’, that word that was all her hope, was all there was.  
  
She stared at him expectantly, avoiding the drips plonking down through the roof of the rain spattered bus shelter. She was sure the solution was something to do with that flying scrapyard he called a ship. He’d said when she saved her father that his people could have stopped this sort of thing, and that what she’d changed would stay changed. There was bound to be some sort of amazingly complicated Time Lordesque plan hiding in his back pocket.   
  
But he didn’t go on. ‘Why are you so interested?’ he asked, instead.  
  
More cider went down her throat as a not very subtle distraction mechanism, and by the time she’d swallowed, she’d got her reactions back under control. ‘No reason.’  
  
She brushed it off, although the reason was sitting in front of her with a battered sausage half eaten in its fingers.  
  
He gave her another searching look, which she returned for as long as she was sure he wouldn’t find anything. Giving up, he dumped the rest of his grease mountain in the bin. ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’  
  
She ignored the vibrations of the phone, set to silent mode and stashed in her pocket, stood, and took his outstretched hand. ‘Thought you’d never ask,’ she said.  
  
She left the cider to the covetous hands of the first passing tramp that should happen along.   
  
‘Right - your choice,’ he offered, typing pointless commands into the ship, and humming softly under his breath. ‘Who do you want to go and see next?’  
  
‘Surprise me,’ she answered, although she would have been more surprised not to be digging out her naughty schoolgirl outfit within the next couple of minutes.   
  
But she didn’t feel sick, and she relaxed in the jumpseat and just smiled at him, hugging her ‘unless’ with a secret stranglehold. It was a fire of hope that warmed her soul. He watched her from across the room as the ship dematerialised, pottered about a bit, and turned up somewhere else.  
  
‘Did I mention that I love you?’ he asked eventually, dashing down the ramp and leaving a grin hanging in the air behind him.  
  
‘Couple of times, maybe,’ she responded, her heart lifting for the first time in days.  
  
He flung open the doors. ‘Good. Remember it.’  
  
Her phone rang, she looked at Mickey’s number flashing on the screen and decided to answer it at last, because it didn’t seem to matter one way or the other what she did. She could accept the entrance of Krillitanes and stupid oil because she knew that a solution was waiting in the wings, and as soon as she got back to that frogs-legs spaceship it would take to the stage, and deliver its happy ending.   
  
‘Hello?’ she said.   
  
Mickey didn’t answer. She could hear the Doctor outside, his voice raised in a question as he saw where they weren’t. ‘Hello?’ And then: ‘Oh. It’s you. Hello.’  
  
Mickey replied as she stepped out of the ship. ‘Yeah. Hello back. Where’ve you been? I’ve been ringing for days.’  
  
Her phone still in her hand, and not even glancing in the Doctor’s direction she gave Mickey a tight hug, and let him go. ‘Phone must be broken.’ She shrugged.  
  
‘Ha, you can tell he’s been messing with it,’ observed Mickey, and the Doctor snatched it out of her hand with a sigh of exasperation.   
  
Her definitely ex-boyfriend followed the movement with his eyes, and then narrowed them, grabbed her left hand and let his face fall slack with shock.   
  
He pointed to the ring. ‘Oh my God.’ Looked up at her. Pointed to the ring again. ‘Oh my God.’  
  
Rose could feel the embarrassment warming her cheeks and she knew she was playing with a royal flush. Mickey’s face veered from surprise, to hurt, to laughter as he watched her shake her head and rush to start tugging the gold band off her finger. She didn’t dare look up at the Doctor, feeling very young, and ashamed at having been caught hanging onto something that meant nothing, while pretending to herself that it did. She fumbled to get the mistake off her finger as quick as she could, gabbling a bit.  
  
‘It’s not what you think. We’re not married or anything. We met Queen Victoria, and, well, it’s just a joke really. Only a joke.’  
  
The Doctor’s hand closed around her wrist. He was standing very, very close, staring down at her with that precious something parading around in his eyes. ‘Do you see me laughing?’ he said quietly, pushing the ring back onto her finger again. ‘Leave it.’  
  
She wandered into the blueness of his gaze and got lost.   
  
Mickey found her again. ‘Oh my God,’ he said again, and a lot louder. ‘You and him? Him? And you? In there?’ Nodding towards the TARDIS.  
  
The incredulity in his voice snapped her consciousness back into place, but she couldn’t look him straight in the eye.   
  
The Doctor turned slightly, put his arm obtrusively round her waist. ‘Yeah,’ he said, eyeballing Mickey while she examined the dirt on her shoes. There was a ‘do you want to make something of it,’ unspoken in the tense silence.   
  
‘Can I tell your mum?’ Mickey pleaded at last, a lot more quietly.   
  
Rose shrugged, not really wanting to think about her mother’s reaction to having the Doctor as a potential son in law. She doubted she would escape with her eardrums intact.   
  
‘So what are we doing here?’ asked the owner of the vice-like grip on her side.  
  
Mickey frowned, and from the sneaky glance she threw him, she could see he was still staring at her. ‘Lots of UFO sightings, a school getting really good results.’ He pointed behind him. ‘That’s it over here. I thought you’d be interested, but I’ve been calling for days. I had to get a job as assistant caretaker just to have a look inside.’  
  
She noted he was wearing blue overalls and had a huge bunch of keys dangling from one hand. It didn’t suit him.   
  
‘There’s a new head teacher, and loads of the staff got replaced not long ago. They have all these special classes for the kids and they don’t let ‘em bring sandwiches either. Plus I keep looking behind the bike sheds and there’s nobody smoking, or doing anything…else.’ He trailed off, looking from one to the other of them. ‘You’d know all about that.’  
  
She shifted a bit uncomfortably, moved out of the Doctor’s embrace. ‘So how d’you know all this?’ she queried, not sure a caretaker would have managed to pick up all the relevant information quite so quickly.   
  
Mickey nodded back down the street and she noted a dark haired woman, standing just inside the pool of shadow cast by a flickering yellow streetlamp.’ First night I was here I was having a look round. Caught her snooping.’  
  
The Doctor wandered off towards the woman with his hands in his pockets. She didn’t mind him going. She knew he’d be back.  
  
As soon as he was out of earshot Mickey hissed, ‘What are you doing with him?’ He realised what he was asking and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t want the details. But why? He’s an alien and stuff. And how long’s it been going on for?’  
  
She smiled at him, and remembered how much he cared about her. She patted his arm. ‘Only the last couple of days. When I came back home last time, well, everything changed. I didn’t plan it. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’  
  
Mickey shrugged. ‘I saw the way you were looking at him at Christmas. You really love him, don’t you?’  
  
Her embarrassment saw an opening and sprinted back to turn her cheeks red once again. She nodded.  
  
The Doctor cleared his throat behind her. ‘Rose — this is Sarah Jane Smith. Sarah Jane — Rose Tyler. Rose…. travels with me now.’  
  
She regarded Sarah Jane with a lot more warmth than she’d managed to show last time, mostly because she could see the Doctor had that little proud expression hanging around the corners of his eyes again.   
  
Mickey snorted. ‘Travels? The only place you’ve been taking her is… well. You’d know all about that.’  
  
Sarah Jane looked distinctly confused, opened her mouth to ask.   
  
The Doctor changed the subject. ‘Right. Rose, you and Mickey have a look round the kitchens, me and Sarah Jane’ll do the headteacher's office. We’ve got some catching up to do. See you later.’ He leaned down and gave Rose a peck on the cheek.  
  
Sarah Jane looked even more confused, but the Doctor held out his hand to her and they walked off together in the direction of the school.   
  
Mickey patted Rose on the shoulder. ‘I guess he’s desperate for all the 'handholding' he can get,' - he winked at her suggestively. 'But then, you’d know all about that.’  
  
‘If you’re even thinking about making that your new catchphrase you can stop it right now,’ she said sharply, but she followed the familiar route to the kitchens, glad to have escaped the plastic hat and apron this time.   
  
A sample of Krillitane oil later and she was back at Sarah Jane’s car to find a fully functional K-9, with no hint of battery problems, or a stutter, and decidedly less rust, ready to analyse the chip fat she was carrying. Mechanically minded men could fix mechanically minded things in about half the time, it seemed. The revelation over with, they decided to reconvene at the school in the morning and confront the head teacher.   
  
‘Do you two want to come back to the TARDIS?’ asked the Doctor, more out of politeness than anything else, she thought.  
  
Mickey and Sarah Jane looked at each other and proved that telepathy was alive and well and part of the usual range of human abilities. ‘No,’ they said together.  
  
With the doors of the TARDIS closed behind them, and the doors of the bedroom closed behind them, and clothes unzipped, unhooked and slung all over the floor behind them, Rose crawled on top of the Doctor and threw her leg across his hip.  
  
‘So,’ she said, because now was a good time to ask. ‘Aren’t you bothered about the future?’  
  
He paused with his hands on her breasts, his thumbs caressing her nipples with that callused charm they had, while he probed for the right angle between her legs. ‘Future, past, present — all that ever could be. Kind of a genetic trait. Why?’  
  
She flexed her muscles, pushed the willing wet warmth of her body down, down on top of him, letting him fill the space inside her, before pulling back up. He stilled, tension throbbing through him when she let him enter her, and breathed out heavily as she slid off. ‘You never even mentioned Sarah Jane. You left her behind.’  
  
She dropped on top of him again, straightened her back, because almost the whole of his wide, hard heat was wedged up close between her thighs. He arched his legs off the bed slightly, putting his hands on her hips. ‘More?’ he asked.   
  
As soon as she nodded his strong grip forced her down with a jerk onto the quick upward thrust of his body. She paused there for a while, gasping, wriggling around a bit, getting used to that tight constriction within her again, splitting her open. He inserted a finger into the slot between her spread legs, just in front of the place where their bodies joined, and he rubbed at it until she felt one sort of tension mutate into another and his hand became slippery with her readiness.   
  
He said, after a while, ‘I promised I won’t do that to you. I’m trying not to.’  
  
She started to move then, a slow grind that matched the hot attentions of his hand, a hard punishing routine that gripped the thickness inside her tight, and wouldn’t let it go. The painful pleasure on his face showed that he felt every rock of her hips, every smooth withdrawal, the resistance as he plunged back in.   
  
Pausing for breath, she asked: ‘But why not? She’s aged, and it’ll happen to me too - I’ll decay, I’ll wither away and die. You won’t spend the rest of your life with me.’  
  
He ignored her, jabbed upwards again and made her cry out. ‘Yeah, and then I’ll live on alone, it’s a curse, I know.’  
  
She put her hands firmly on his chest, wiped the sweat out of her eyes, settled him into her again and began to speed up. ‘More,’ he asked through gritted teeth and she spent a couple of minutes watching him strain towards release, with the nails of both his hands digging into her bottom, controlling the increasing violence of her hips as she rode him. He surged up within her, surged up to fill her, combining the wetness of her encircling embrace with the driving hard friction seeking solace between her thighs. ‘More’ he begged, his head pushed so far back her only view was of his throat working convulsively to swallow down the cries he wanted to make as her pace increased. She changed her angle, her hands behind her, and she saw the pressure thrumming through his muscles, the distinctive grunts he couldn’t hold back that marked the start of his orgasm.   
  
He pulled himself back from the edge with a groan. ‘But I love you, and not just for when you’re young and pretty either. So what if you age? I’d rather spend years living with you than dying slowly on my own.’  
  
He was buried inside her body, but he had also lodged himself deep within her soul. She couldn’t hold him tight enough, couldn’t fit him in far enough, couldn’t slam down to meet him fast enough, or often enough, or hard enough to tell him how much she loved him. She made him come. She forced him to come. She knew what he liked and she didn’t stop giving it to him until his hands were curled into fists at his sides, until his eyes and his mouth shut tight, until his body was shining with effort and need. He jerked up into her one final time with a long drawn out cry, and she felt the convulsions power through her with the force of his climax. Crawling into her place at his side she was full of him, slick and wet with her own flood of pleasure but with an aching heart that throbbed just as loudly. She wrapped herself around the talisman of her ‘unless’ and hoped beyond hope, hoped beyond reason, that fate would blink, and she would never have to let him go.  
  
‘Unless,’ he said. ‘You end up looking like your mother, in which case I take it back.’  
  
The next morning there was an awful lot of dithering, she thought. Quite a lot of time wasting too, with a smattering of prevarication and side order of putting things off. She just wanted to get back to the TARDIS and back into bed as quickly as possible. She was uninterested in the possibility of the Doctor becoming a god. She didn’t think God had done her any favours so far. The Doctor spent some time posturing with the strange headmaster though, until she ran her hand down his trousers and gave his backside a squeeze. That seemed to destroy his concentration somewhat. Not nearly as much as the headmaster’s was affected when she flicked the remains of her Krillitane oil at his face with a handy ruler. Well, she thought, naughty schoolgirls had to live up to their reputation sometimes.  
  
The Doctor looked at her following a short interlude of running away, Sarah Jane and Mickey catching up, fresh from watching children playing green crossword puzzles. ‘So I’m thinking kitchens, oil, great big explosion — you?’  
  
She looked round. ‘Not so great at causing explosions but I’m sure I had a big sign saying ‘chase me’ somewhere.’  
  
He sighed. ‘Alright then, but take Mickey and K-9 and run fast.’  
  
Sarah Jane was sent off with instructions to clear the school and far less of an impact on the situation than she’d had last time. There was some shooting, followed by angry flapping noises, and then some more running (and rolling) down corridors, before they all made it into the kitchen and out the other side in time for the Doctor’s impromptu explosion. Job done, thought Rose, only one more place to go before we fix this timeline and ditch the deja-vu — and the French. She shivered a bit at the thought of all the shouting still to come, and then shivered a bit more when she thought of all the making up that would follow it.   
  
First, there were goodbyes to be said. Mickey kept following her into the TARDIS, looking vaguely surprised when she said she was leaving and he wouldn’t be going with her.  
  
‘Look after yourself then,’ he said, shaking off the little voice that was obviously telling him to stay. ‘Make sure he takes good care of you.’  
  
She smiled at him sadly, realising at last just how precious the ordinary, practical parts of life actually were. ‘You’d know all about that,’ she said, and he looked a bit tearful as he turned away.  
  
The Doctor returned from whatever farewell speech he’d been giving Sarah Jane and she thought he looked a bit tearful too. She put a hand on his arm. Finally, it was confession time.   
  
‘Take me anywhere,’ she said. ‘And then I’ve got something to tell you.’  
  
‘Anywhere’ was a misnomer, because there was only one place they could possibly end up next, and that was back at the beginning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My romance novel, The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer was inspired by this story - if you are enjoying this, you will probably like that one too.


	10. Chapter 10

The Doctor gave Rose a long, careful stare. She was nervous as she watched his hands moving slowly over the panel, and nervous as the engine started its noisy rotation. By the time it ground to a halt she was terrified and as she saw him drop heavily into the jumpseat without even looking to see where they were ‘petrified with fright’ had taken over. Stomach churning, gut clenching sickness claimed her when she nudged the doors open, took a swift, confirmatory look at the slow-roasted spaceship outside and dissolved into a small puddle of fear. With this Doctor, you always had to be prepared for the shouting, it was just that she didn’t think she’d prepared enough. And in any case, it wasn’t the shouting so much that she was worried about — the disappointment she would see in his eyes, the loss of that pride in her when he realised she’d lied to him. Those things were far worse than a bit of volume. She wasn’t even sure what his saving the world plan would consist of either, and it was possible that it wouldn’t be too pleasant. All in all, all things considered, there were more than enough reasons to be scared.   
  
Time pulled one of its patented slow motion sequences as she closed the doors, turned back to face the looming confrontation, began the thousand year trail of footsteps that would lead her to the truth. She passed the console, her eyes on the floor, and the TARDIS gave her a ‘serves you right’ look. For an inanimate object with no expression whatsoever, the ship still managed to convey exactly what it was thinking, and it was thinking mostly ‘smug’.  
  
Time had hunted her down, and she was cornered. Inevitable, really, when you travelled inside a box.  
  
The Doctor wasn’t looking at her, he was biting his thumbnail, giving it the benefit of his rapt attention. She took a seat beside him, along with a very deep breath, and forced her eyes up to an approximation of where his face would be when he realised what she was saying and started in with the yelling.   
  
He swivelled an eye towards her while she was still debating where to start. ‘Well?’  
  
His voice fell heavy into the silence, sending ripples of tension washing across the room. He didn’t sound the slightest bit curious, she thought, just resigned, and calm, and very, very familiar. This was the voice that whispered her name in the empty stillness of the night, reassuring and warm. This was the voice that cried out to her, throaty with need, begging for release. This voice said ‘I love you’ and made the stars echo to its sound.   
  
‘Well?’ he asked again, and this time there was a hint of impatience in his tone.  
  
She needed another deep breath, and just enough time to consider whether there was any other possible way out she could think of that wouldn’t involve him seeing her as a bit tarnished. But she couldn’t imagine that this adventure would end any differently to any other one before it, and she had to avoid horses and mirrors at all costs.   
  
He picked up her hand, put it in his lap, gave her another of his mind reading stares. ‘Get it over with Rose,’ he said quietly.  
  
A third deep breath and she jumped. The words of her long ago prepared speech came tumbling out of her mouth, delighted to be free at last. ‘You can’t go outside. I’ve been here before. I went back and I changed the timeline and it was an accident I swear, so please don’t shout at me yet.’  
  
‘I know, Rose.’  
  
‘And then we’ve just been doing the same things I did before, like at the hospital, the cures thing was your idea, and you worked out the telescope, and I remembered what you said about the oil and now we’re back here again and this spaceship is full of time windows and there’s this French woman and you’re going to jump through a mirror on a horse and leave me behind and use the ‘unless’’. It had been a very deep breath.  
  
‘Use the what?’ he said blankly.  
  
She frowned. ‘What do you mean you know?’ There was a pause. ‘And why aren’t you shouting?’  
  
He sighed, dropped her hand, and leaned against the back of the chair, his eyes scanning the ceiling. ‘I know. Of course I know. I knew from the first moment you woke up, wearing different clothes and with different hair and a sort of...hunger in your eyes when you looked at me. Why do you think I ran off to check so fast? Besides, the TARDIS couldn’t wait to tell me — she’s really not best pleased with you, you know.’  
  
‘But,’ said Rose. ‘But.’ There wasn’t any more of that sentence in her head. Single words were all she could manage.  
  
He didn’t look at her, ploughed on. ‘And in any case you’re a terrible liar. The truth just shines out of you whether you want it to or not. I kept giving you opportunities to spill it but you wouldn’t. I could see you struggling not to tell me. And I was sure I’d never mentioned dogs with no noses before either.’  
  
She gazed at him with her mouth open, dazed.  
  
‘But I couldn’t work out why for a while.’  
  
He unlocked his stare from the roof, and twisted to face her. She could see his eyes were horribly tender, vulnerable, as they took in her shocked expression. She didn’t want him vulnerable, she wanted him shouting, all fired up with save the world fury, ready to ride out and fix the mess she’d made.   
  
‘I died, didn’t I?’  
  
She didn’t know what to say, nodded, shook her head, nodded again.   
  
He frowned. ‘But you wanted me back badly enough to go through all this? Worrying yourself sick every day?’  
  
Her fingers opened and closed in her lap. ‘You left me. The new you did,’ she managed finally, past dry lips and a mouth full of ashes.  
  
There was a deep crease between his eyes now, and he pushed himself firmly off the seat, and walked over to the doors. His footsteps clattered with a dull, dead noise against the metal of the floor and all the customary enthusiasm written into every line of his body had fled. She watched him walk outside, scan the battered flight deck, push a few buttons, peer at the cold fireplace barely visible in the next room.   
  
He called out. ‘There’s nobody on board. Rose — what happens next?’  
  
She couldn’t help but respond, despite herself, the same way she always did whenever he called her name. She shuffled out of the doors, her mind still groping for understanding. ‘You go through there.’ She pointed at the fireplace. ‘You meet a woman. There are clockwork robots. They want to kill her. You jump through a mirror to save her but you break the time windows and you can’t get back. You leave me behind.’   
  
He looked at her for a long moment, and the warmth of his stare wrapped itself around her like a cocoon, soothing away the sting of the words. His heart spoke within the blue silence, a familiar something with the name of love whispering across the room. Eventually he turned away, muttering to himself. ‘Break the windows. Trap the robots. Save the girl.’ He looked up with a sudden flashing grin, put his hand on a very large, and very shiny button. ‘Ready?’ he asked.   
  
She nodded, prepared for a complicated technological solution befitting a mechanically minded man. He pushed the button and the ship plunged into darkness.   
  
‘What did you do?’ she shouted at him, squinting in the sudden black, the only illumination provided by the open doors to the TARDIS console room behind her.  
  
His voice floated out of the emptiness. ‘First rule of computers. If in doubt, turn it off. I switched off the engines — no power, no time windows. Simple.’ She could hear the smile in his tone. ‘So I left you here, and you what — waited? Got bored of waiting? Tried to use emergency programme one?’  
  
She nodded, unseen, but she was starting to feel a bit more in control, a little bit more positive about the whole thing. He’d sorted out the French connection in five seconds flat. All he had to do was come up with the solution to the whole circular timelines issue, all this repetitive torment would stop and they could go back to bed. She felt his hand brush against her in the darkness, and he led her back to the light, back inside the TARDIS, back to the jumpseat, back home. But he resumed his place beside her without meeting her eyes.   
  
‘So what’s the plan then?’ she asked, because he was still looking at his fingers, picking stray threads off his jeans. ‘How do we make the timeline stay changed?’  
  
‘We can’t,’ he said, his head bowed.  
  
She waited for the unless. He didn’t say it. She had to remind him. ‘Unless….’ She trailed off expectantly.  
  
He sighed, looked up into the middle distance. ‘Unless nothing. There is no unless. There’s nothing I can do.’  
  
She didn’t believe him for one second — there was always a saving the world plan scurrying somewhere at the back of his mind. She tried to encourage it out. ‘Don’t you need to use the TARDIS or something? Make what I changed stay changed?’  
  
He shrugged. ‘I can’t. I can’t go back and change the original timeline into this one. Things just don’t work like that. It would be… well…Bad.’ She could hear the capital letter. ‘The best I can do is go back to Satellite Five, before any of this happened, and see that it doesn’t happen again. I can use the TARDIS to put things back the way they were if I need to. The first timeline’s still there. I can feel it. Why do you think you’ve ended up in exactly the same place again? But just to make sure, you’re not going anywhere. If you don’t go back then today, and yesterday and all of this won’t exist anyway. And you won’t have to carry the memory either, not like last time. This isn’t a wound in time, more like an amputation.’  
  
‘But?’ she said. ‘But?’ Back to the one word sentences again.   
  
He looked at her at last. ‘Some things just aren’t meant to be. This — us - didn’t happen. Doesn’t matter whether you call it fate, or time, or just bad luck. The universe isn’t kind or cruel or anything else. Life doesn’t have a rewind button. You only get one chance and you have to make the most of it. Sometimes you can’t save the world.’  
  
She thought that if she shook her head hard enough she could dislodge the words drifting into it, forget she’d ever heard them. ‘But why?’ her voice broke and she had to try again. ‘Why — if you knew, if there’s no way out and if everything’s fixed — why did you let me think it would be okay? Why not tell me? Why give me unless?’  
  
His eyes shone with a filmy haze. ‘Hope, Rose.’  
  
She was uncomprehending.  
  
‘No one can live without hope. Doesn’t matter if you know what’s coming or not. Doesn’t matter if you believe in destiny or religion or whatever. Everyone needs hope. Otherwise, why bother getting up in the morning? After the werewolf your hope was dying so I gave you some of mine. Hope is the best answer I’ve got. Hope is the only real saving the world plan I ever have.’  
  
‘But you knew, all the time. You guessed you shouldn’t be here. What was there to hope for?’  
  
He shrugged, grazed her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Don’t you know?’  
  
She couldn’t see through a hot sheet of tears.   
  
‘For another day with you. For a bit more time. I hoped for that, even if there was nothing else.’  
  
‘No,’ she tried to shout but it came out twisted. ‘That’s not a good enough answer. This is what you did last time — you just gave up. You saw the problem and you gave up and walked away. And you left me behind. You promised.’ She choked on a sob.   
  
She felt his arms come around her, press her so tight against his chest that she found it hard to breathe. Her tears pooled, ran down his coat in shining torrents. He stroked her hair and rocked her while she sobbed herself dry and then his grip released, and he pulled away, put his hands on her arms.  
  
‘I won’t leave until I have to,’ he said, and he reached down to kiss her.  
  
Her thoughts skittered to a halt again. She didn’t want to think any more. She wanted only skin, and more skin, and the solid bulk of him inside her, telling her that he was still real, still here. She kissed him back with a desperate passion, closed her eyes against the cruelty of the universe and knew herself lifted, his hands stripping away her clothes, and she was on her back on the console again. She welcomed the first long rush of his heat between her legs, sat up to hold him tight, to feel every flicker of movement in his shoulders as he stabbed into her again, calling, sighing, sobbing her name. I love you, she replied in the movement of her hips as she matched his urgent thrusts, and her body had to translate the words that grief held prisoner. He slowed with a tremble she could feel pulsing through the core of her being, and with a conscious effort, stilled the hard motion of his loins, and slid into her more gradually, carefully, deliberately.  
  
He extended the last moments of their joining with a delicate attention, time filigreed and chased into a complicated pattern to spin it out as far as possible. When she came she didn’t notice what was happening for a while, so gradually did the ecstasy creep up on her, so gently did he move to heighten her sensations. A deep felt and spreading warmth sucked away her tension and left her resting on his chest as his body quaked in the throes of his own release. He kissed her again, and she knew it was finished.   
  
He had to physically remove her arms from around his neck, just to get her to let him go, and while she lay back with the world in ruins around her he smiled his customary, cheery grin. It was a smile without a shadow of pain behind it and she could easily believe that the sheer power of his hope had kept him going. He had watched her flounder with the knowledge of impending doom and she only saw now how he had tried to encourage her to tell him, had wanted to extend his hand and his hope and let her hold onto it. She felt acutely ashamed, although his eyes told her that he was still proud of her, had always been proud of her, at this moment more than ever.   
  
He was waiting.   
  
It took several centuries to get dressed. Time was a torturer now, an agonising tormentor, laughing in the face of her defeat. Fate hovered in the shadows, ready to sweep him away. Fragments of shattered possibilities lay scattered on the ground, and all hope was dust. Her fingers numb, her heart dead. She couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to fight, couldn’t believe he’d see this biggest of all big problems and not even attempt to fix it. She couldn’t believe he was planning to leave her behind.   
  
He was already outside.   
  
She shuffled to the doors, stepped into the cold darkness of the abandoned ship, and decided to shout and shout until he found another answer. But he jumped in first, forestalled her.   
  
‘How long did you wait?’ he asked. ‘For me to come back. How long did you wait?’  
  
‘For him,’ she replied absently, ‘five and a half hours. For you — a lifetime.’  
  
He was so close she could have reached out and touched him, but inside, she felt he was already gone. He looked into her, the force of his gaze searing. ‘I promised to look after you. Always. Five and a half hours isn’t nearly long enough to give up hope.’ She could see that he wanted to take her in his arms, but his goodbyes had already been said. ‘I’ll be back,’ he promised.   
  
And he turned and walked away, and he left her behind. The TARDIS door was nearly shut when he pulled it wide, poked his head out again.   
  
‘Did I mention that I love you?’ he asked, and there was still that unbreakable optimism in his tone.  
  
‘Couple of times, maybe.’ Her eyes blurred.   
  
‘Good. Remember it.’  
  
She hoped she would. She had nothing else left to hope for.   
  
She watched the TARDIS as it faded into the darkness.   
  
She watched the TARDIS, outlined in the dull electric glow of the strip lighting and tried not to hear Mickey whinging in the background. She felt odd. Not a great word, but the only one she could think of to make sense of the weightless heaviness of her heart. She felt….odd. Like she’d put something down and couldn’t think where she’d left it. Like there were words she needed to say on the tip of her tongue but she couldn’t recall what they were. She had a strange feeling she should be crying but she couldn’t imagine why.   
  
And her left hand was a little universe of oddness all on its own. She examined it carefully, completely unable to understand why it felt so light. There was a dent around her ring finger, a slightly pale mark that she didn’t think had been there the last time she looked. It was all very…odd.  
  
There were footsteps behind her. A familiar tread. Without asking, she knew he was back. The Doctor had returned. She didn’t look round.   
  
There was something she should be remembering. Something important. Something precious and strong. She rubbed her finger. She had forgotten what it was.   
  


 

This is the choose your own adventure bit. If you want it to be Ten who comes back through the fireplace, then the BBC has already obliged. But if you would prefer it to be Nine then well...  I may have written some more. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the usual plug for my books - The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer.


	11. Chapter 11

Tripping along the well worn lanes of the vortex, on her way back to an appointment with destiny, the TARDIS thought about hope. Then she realised what she was doing, and felt slightly embarrassed, which was even worse than the thinking.  
  
Thinking was something no self-respecting TARDIS would ever admit to. Even though there was no one left to admit anything to anymore, still there were standards to maintain. Thinking was fallible, imprecise, squishy. Ships, especially brilliantly advanced, technologically complicated miracles of engineering did not do squishy. Proper ships calculated, plotted variables, measured probabilities. There were parts of the TARDIS that had a distinct squishiness about them — she was sort of alive after all - but it would be extremely impolite to mention them in company and the TARDIS operated a don’t ask, don’t tell policy.  
  
Except for right at the moment. Right at the moment, she was sorely tempted to tell him what she was thinking, even if he hadn’t asked. He had set course for Satellite Five (again) and then slumped in the jumpseat, but he kept muttering to himself. Standing up, pacing around a bit, and muttering.

‘Five and a half hours,’ he said. ‘Five and a half hours. What could I possibly be doing for five and a half hours?’  
  
The TARDIS had already deleted emergency programme one from her databanks. The stupid thing had forced her into far too many conversations with the frighteningly primitive mind of the girl but thankfully in a couple of hours, the effects would have worn off entirely. No more being tempted to do anything, no more jealousy or revenge or anger, or any other of the vapid emotions she’d absorbed through too much human contact.   
  
Ships that did not eat should not crave chocolate. TARDISes were not renowned for having feet, and therefore thinking about pointy shoes was completely pointless. There were times when the TARDIS was glad that all the other TARDISes had gone bye bye so she’d never have to admit how far below her own standards she’d fallen.   
  
This was precisely why it was so dangerous to spend all your vacations on Earth. She'd thought being marooned there was quite bad enough, but no, given any excuse at all, and it was rare that the excuses were as sophisticated as wanting a pint of milk these days, he’d be straight back with those same co-ordinates. It was like someone had pinned a giant elastic band to the centre of the planet and wrapped the other end round his waist. If she had to see that housing estate where he’d picked up the girl one more time she’d promised to send a fake declaration of war to the next passing alien with a really big gun. 

He was still talking to himself, and ignoring her completely. ‘I promised to protect her. I wouldn’t have left her for some French woman, would I? Who will look after her if I don’t make it back? She needs me.’  
  
The TARDIS generally paid little attention to the words of the man she owned, because there were usually too many of them, but she was rather more attentive to his thoughts. Since Gallifrey packed its bags and left for oblivion the inside of his mind had not been a fun place to be. It was too quiet, for a start, with just him echoing around inside it, and over time, she’d noticed he was getting things out of perspective, making some distinctly out of character decisions for a Time Lord. Only recently had he managed to regain some semblance of the man he’d been before the war, and even then that peace was fragile, and rested mostly on close proximity to a certain female.

He reached out and typed some co-ordinates into her control centre, and then cancelled them almost immediately. It was lucky that the TARDIS generally paid little attention to his actions either, or they’d have been halfway to making a really big mistake already.

‘I can’t, can I?’ he asked. ‘I shouldn’t. There would be consequences.’

She lowered the lighting level slightly, pushed some air through the rotor to indicate that no, he shouldn’t. Really, he shouldn’t. But then she’d said the same thing about creating emergency programme one, and he hadn’t listened to her then either. Nor had his next incarnation listened when she’d reminded him to delete the damn thing. She wouldn’t need to take control so much if only he’d listen to her more.

Two TARDISes really should not be in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. Even if there weren’t any laws any more to stop it, sheer common sense should have told him no. But he wasn’t listening.

‘None of this is her fault,’ he said. ‘I have to save her.’ His hands hovered over the controls.   
  
The co-ordinates he’d set originally would take them back to the Gamestation before the girl appeared the first time round — a tricky calculation, but nothing that a brilliantly advanced, technologically complicated miracle of engineering couldn’t manage. They would find the proverbial shady spot, because as long as you were very, very careful, you could be in the nearly the same place at nearly the same time. Time travel was just a matter of parking, after all. After that, they would watch, make sure he regenerated, make sure that what was meant to be actually happened. Without an unattended TARDIS and without emergency programme one the girl couldn’t come back from the fireplace and the whole of the alternate timeline would cease to exist. This thinking, feeling TARDIS and the muttering man inside her would be wiped out.  
  
‘It’s impossible. I can’t risk it.’ He was on his feet again. He paced. He stopped. He muttered to himself. ‘Unless.’

He reached out and made a course correction, only a tiny one, an hour or two at most, a couple of hundred metres over. The TARDIS had a split second to be horrified before she recovered, reversed the command and locked him out.

‘I know exactly what I’m doing,’ he attempted reassurance, but she could sense him reaching for the rubber mallet. ‘I’ll just go through the original timeline again until I reach the point of divergence – Rose won’t even notice the difference. Everything that should happen will happen, except that I _will_ be coming back through that fireplace and she _will_ be safe.’ He attempted to make the change again, faster this time, and with the application of additional sneaky programming designed to conceal what he was doing.

The TARDIS bared her non existent teeth and cracked her metaphorical knuckles. He was quite mechanically minded, this one, but she was mostly mechanical and he’d have to try a lot harder than that to force her to do something that was so obviously wrong. The co-ordinates he was trying to plot would land the TARDIS exactly on top of her former self, back in the original timeline, just at the point that the girl had destroyed all the Daleks and still had the power of the vortex released and at play in the universe. The result of having two time machines in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, added to the tremendous uncontrolled power available in that particular minute would cause a cataclysm strong enough to rupture the fabric of existence. It might just be enough to create a fixed point in time and disrupt the original chain of events as well, but more than likely the universe would just go boom and leave a sticky mess all over the carpet.

The TARDIS shut down all her higher command functions, bypassed every circuit which allowed manual input and disengaged her telepathic link. Then she sat back and waited for him to make a move. He pushed a single button. She had to admit to being slightly disappointed.

From the console emerged a bit of equipment that closely resembled a steering wheel, and which she’d let him install over the last few weeks because it seemed to make him happy, and after all, nothing was worse than that bell. He grabbed hold of the wheel in both hands, took a deep breath, and turned it sharply.

There was an instant of surprise before all the lights went out and she found herself switching off.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Postman's Daughter and The Car Crash Bride by Sally Anne Palmer, amazingly, both are still available on Amazon. The Postman's Daughter was based on this story, pretty much.


	12. Chapter 12

Rose heard the footsteps behind her and didn’t turn around, too busy rubbing at her finger to prepare herself for the inevitable inadequate apology. She’d counted every second of the last five and a half hours, and he was going to be sorry for every single one, in detail.   
  
Then there were hands on her shoulders, large, heavy hands, hands she knew intimately, but whose touch was, for some reason, quite a surprise. The hands span her round and she squinted upwards, opening her mouth in preparation for a smart remark.   
  
He kissed her. He dropped his mouth to hers urgently, inhaling the scent of her skin like some life giving elixir, and he kissed her. He opened his mouth, took her in his arms and he kissed her, like there was no tomorrow, and no yesterday, and nothing and nowhere else but now. Gentle at first, just a subtle glancing motion that probed the arch of her lips, a sliding mouth to mouth caress promising hotter and harder kisses later. He held her, and he kissed her, and Rose hung in the Doctor’s embrace and wondered what was going on.   
  
After only a second or two, a minute at most, he relaxed, his eyes flickered open sleepily and he whispered directly against her mouth: ‘How long did you wait?’  
  
A throat cleared itself behind them, overly noisy and a bit annoyed. ‘Five and a half hours,’ said Mickey, quite clearly. ‘And where the hell have you been?’  
  
The Doctor released his grip on her slowly, slowly, searching her face for something she couldn’t supply. He straightened away from the confusion swimming up from the depths of her gaze, from the slight frown gathering between her eyebrows. ‘Where do you think I’ve been?’ he asked, ignoring Mickey.  
  
‘France,’ came her slightly delayed response — delayed by the exact time it took her to take a step backwards out of his embrace. ‘Are you alright?’  
  
He didn’t answer, just stared into her eyes, and she took another step back, scratching her ring finger, waiting for him to remember the concept of language. ‘I said — are you alright?’ She overemphasised each word, wondering if the trip to France had rendered him incapable of understanding English.  
  
‘Alright? Of course I’m alright. I’m always alright. Are you alright?’ He didn’t look alright. There was a pink tinge to his cheeks that was spreading slowly in the direction of his ears, and his blue eyes were wide, flicking randomly from place to place. 

The Doctor glanced at Mickey, who glared back with outright suspicion. ‘So, what took you so long?’ he asked, thrusting out his chest and squaring his shoulders.

Rose stepped around Mickey and her chin raised, even as she folded her arms. ‘Where have you been?’  
  
The Doctor frowned, as if he was having trouble remembering. ’France,’ he murmured. ‘I was in France, in a bedroom. There was a woman. Beautiful.’

Rose raised her eyebrows at that.

He had the sense to sound slightly guilty about the next revelation. ‘She read my mind, and I kissed her.’   
  
‘So you left me behind for nearly six hours to go off French kissing?’ The tone in Rose’s voice had been sharpened over the same period of time. She felt the emotions of the past five and a half hours welling inside her, anger, fear, hurt and mixed with them, the bitter aftertaste of longer held grudges. This wasn’t the first time he’d left her behind, and nor was it the first time he’d chosen someone else. She had always thought she was different to those other women, Lynda, Sarah Jane, the baguette, but he’d proved she was no more special to him than anyone else.

He shrugged. ‘It was only a kiss. You must remember that I…’

Whatever excuse he was going to pedal was cut off. Her chest was tight with the need to start shouting. ‘Only a kiss? Only a kiss for you maybe, but not for me – what if you’d never been able to get back? What if you’d left me and Mickey here in the middle of this pot roast for the rest of our lives? Did you think about that when you were sticking your tongue down her throat?’

He flushed a little more pink but she couldn’t tell if it was guilt or embarrassment. ‘I didn’t want to kiss her Rose, I didn’t have a choice. You do understand that, don’t you?’

‘Didn’t have a choice?’ Rose could hear her volume escalating. ‘What was it – those robots threaten to kill you if you didn’t? Or were you just so overcome by passion that you couldn’t keep your hands off her?’

She wasn’t entirely comfortable that this was turning into an argument about kissing rather than being left behind to die, but it was the thought of him with someone else that most rankled, now that he’d actually returned.

He shrugged, thrust his hands into the pockets of his battered old coat. ‘I didn’t want to. It was a timelines thing.’

Rose felt her eyebrows bump her hairline. ‘A timelines thing? You were destined to be together, is that it? Or is she destined to have your time travelling baby?’

He stared at her, took a step forward. ‘This isn’t going exactly the way I was expecting. I thought you’d react… differently to seeing me. I’m extremely sorry I left you, I’ll never do it again. Do you think you could give me a second chance?’

She looked into his eyes, and was surprised to see that he seemed perfectly genuine, humble almost, in asking forgiveness.

Her volume dropped. ‘And what did you kiss me for? Was that a timelines thing too?’ The itching in her hand was unbearable, and she rubbed at her finger impatiently.

In response he just grinned, a stupid, meaningless grin. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was overcome by passion.’

She gave him a foul look and swept off to her bedroom to nurse her grievances in private.    
  
  
Rose Tyler sat on her bed. She’d been doing a lot of sitting on her bed over the last couple of weeks, lots and lots of sitting, and thinking. This time, there wasn’t so much thinking going on as recalling what it felt like to be kissed. She’d been kissed before of course, but never by a nine hundred year old alien who had obviously put the last nine hundred years to good use on the kissing front. The Doctor had kissed her. Just strolled on up and kissed her squarely on the lips with the sort of first kiss that she doubted she’d ever forget, the sort of first kiss that was nothing like a first kiss, not tentative, or sweet or hurried, but a thorough, self assured masterclass in kissing that would have made her legs tremble if she hadn’t been so annoyed. He had also kissed that French….woman. And then he’d brushed it off with ‘only a kiss’. But it wasn’t only a kiss at all. It was just the latest in a long line of very odd behaviour that had caused her to sit and think quite hard to try to make sense of it all.  
  
She’d pinpointed the start of it to that time she’d rescued him from the Daleks. Her memory was a bit blurry but she distinctly recollected him lying at her feet while she made things happen simply by thinking about it. When she had woken up, she’d been the one lying on the floor of the TARDIS and they’d already landed near her mother’s house. The problem started there. He’d clearly been annoyed with her for smashing the TARDIS open in the first place, because she didn’t remember seeing a lot of him over Christmas, until he’d forgotten to be in a temper and turned up to defeat the Sycorax.   
  
Then they’d gone to New Earth and there had been that whole body swapping exercise with Cassandra where they had - technically - kissed, but seeing as how she’d been possessed at the time, it hardly counted. He was still the same person, he still wore the same coat and the same range of dull coloured jumpers and he still cut his hair short and shouted too much. But he didn’t seem to look at her in the same way. He didn’t seem to be watching every time she turned around and he was treating her more like a friend and less like a…something else. Then came the adventure with the werewolf, and after that she’d realised that she wasn’t special. She’d met Sarah Jane, and she’d understood finally that he had a past and a future that would never include her, and that he was quite happy about it. He’d even said he wasn’t going to stay around long enough to watch her get old, and then he’d proved it by disappearing off to France with no way back.   
  
She scratched her finger. She couldn’t understand why she felt so betrayed. She didn’t have any sort of hold over him, and she couldn’t claim not to have known exactly what she was getting herself into when he’d asked her to come with him that first time. He was the same person he’d been since the word ‘Run’, it was just that she knew him a little bit better and maybe trusted him a little bit less. He had seemed so different in the beginning, he’d kept all his promises, he’d shown her the universe and he’d kept her safe but somehow, lately, she found herself wanting more. The longer she stayed with him the more fallible he became, more prone to making mistakes, more human.   
  
Once, he’d had the power to make her heart flutter just by glancing in her direction. Once he’d hesitated between saving her and saving the world, but now things were complicated. He’d left her, if not for the first time, then for the longest time, and she was nearly sure that when he’d gone to France he’d had no intention of ever coming back. And that hurt. That stung, like antiseptic in a wound, a persistent scab she kept picking off, reopening the pain just to see if it had healed yet and finding it still fresh and sore. He’d left her behind. He might do it again for the next beautiful woman who came along and offered him ‘only a kiss’.   
  
And because he’d been gone for five and a half hours and she’d missed him so much she thought she was dying, and because she wanted him to look at her like he used to, as if she was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen, it took a long time for the tears to stop falling.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer, available now on Amazon.


	13. Chapter 13

Rose dreamed. She dreamed she was awake, although her eyes were closed and she could feel a soft sheet beneath her cheek with the faint smell of oil and metal rising into her nostrils. She was cold, and she could tell it was late but she was happy, rather than tired, happy enough that the hour didn’t matter. She’d also been having sex. Lots and lots of sex. So much sex that the place between her legs was a bit sore, and the sheet underneath her thigh had a certain sticky quality about it. As did the sheet beside her foot, the cotton underneath her left arm, an especially wet patch close to her side and there was a nasty seeping sensation in her left ear that she didn’t want to think about. She was just on the point of starting to shiver when she was covered top to toe in another sheet, and in the immediate warmth of a man’s naked body, along the whole length of her back.  
  
His hand slipped round her waist, pulling her close against him, not that there was an awful lot of comfort to be gained from his spare frame, his hard, smooth muscles, but it was his presence in bed with her that counted, soothed. When she opened her eyes a crack in the dream she found the two of them in a private tented little world, the sheet over her head cutting out any view of the room beyond the bed. She didn’t care. He was all she needed.   
  
His lips pressed a kiss onto her right shoulder and she relished the intimacy of his touch. ‘Better?’ he asked, in that distinctive Northern accent.    
  
Then a loud knocking sent him fleeing back into the mysterious depths of her imagination. She stretched, yawned, as relaxed as a bout of ferocious crying and a heavy, unbroken sleep could make her. As soon as she isolated the door as the source of her impromptu alarm clock she found she was hoping very much to find Mickey on the other side of it, and not the alien she’d been caught dreaming about. Mickey gave her the same hopeful glance he’d shot her on his first day on board, the suggestive stare that took in her bed, and her body, and ended up in a broad smile and raised eyebrows. He got the same bucketful of no thrown over him this morning as he’d got last time, but she knew he wouldn’t stop trying. There was always the chance she might give in and he knew it.  
  
He was standing in the corridor and wearing shorts. Orange and green shorts with an enormous flower pattern splashed across them and there was a bright yellow beachtowel round his shoulders. He was carrying a bucket and spade.   
  
‘You’ll never guess where we are,’ he said, despite all evidence to the contrary.   
  
She rolled her eyes, wondering vaguely how those swimming trunks had got into the wardrobe room in the first place.  
  
‘We’ve landed on a beach,’ he gabbled excitedly while she went back inside to clean her teeth and find an industrial grade cleanser to remove the evidence of crying. He followed, chattering. ‘Except that there’s no sand, just shells or something. And it’s red. And there’s no sea, not really. And the sun’s a bit funny too. But apart from that, we’re on a beach,’ he finished brightly. ‘I bet it’s a killer beach too.’  
  
She went into the bathroom to change into the new bikini she’d bought at Christmas and hadn’t had a chance to use yet.  
  
‘Maybe there’ll be killer crabs?’ Mickey called after her. ‘Great big killer crabs that want to take over the world. No? How about killer beachballs then? Deadly Frisbees? Something dangerous, bound to be.’  
  
She’d slipped out to the post Sycorax invasion sales (monster discounts) while the Doctor was still stuck in the TARDIS. He’d never seen her in her bikini. Actually, he’d never seen her with her clothes off either, but she didn’t think he’d be all that interested anyway, especially since his tastes clearly ran to overdressed corset wearing courtesans who thought wigs were the height of fashion.   
  
Chucking some spare clothes and a towel in a bag she scraped her unwashed hair back into a scruffy knot and followed the ever excitable Mickey through the ship. ‘Ah ha,’ he suggested. ‘Killer deckchairs. I’m right, aren’t I? Rose?’   
  
They stepped outside. Instantly, she realised Mickey had been wrong. They hadn’t landed on a beach at all; they’d landed on an apology.   
  
She was looking at one of the most beautiful places she’d ever seen. True, the soft sandesque substance beneath her feet was a pale, delicate red, but it sparkled with a multi-faceted radiance like someone had crushed fire and scattered it for her to walk on. The beach was a brilliant swathe of ruby, heading down to a placid white sea, rolling like a blanket in gentle pillows against the shore. It was clearly some sort of gas, rather than water, but with the thickness of condensed clouds and an opalescent tinge that shimmered and twisted into arcs of scarlet lightening as she watched. And the sound it made as it gathered the sand up in its careful hands was breathtaking, an orchestral arrangement of harmony, note on tinkling note, wide sweeping rushes of music that slipped contentment in through her ears. It was warm too, the light of the molten sun hanging low over the horizon reaching out as if to caress every pore of her skin individually. A less bucket and spade beach she had never seen.  
  
This was a seriously grown up holiday destination, although it didn’t look like anyone else had done much holidaying. A single trail of footsteps headed out from the TARDIS and up into the low foothills that bordered the sand, their regular mounded shapes stretching away in pink tinted regularity. Far, far in the distance, mountains loomed darkly against the magenta washed sky. Apart from the song of the sea the place was quiet, with a haunting melancholy that made her feel quite scandalously underdressed.   
  
It was the sort of place where shouting, and crying, as well as danger, running away and any need to save the world could be set to one side in favour of a whole day of peace and just lying still. It was the sort of place where broken things came to be fixed, where arguments resolved themselves and were forgotten.  
  
She estimated it would take the Doctor around twenty minutes to get bored and start moaning about sand in the TARDIS, whereas she could happily have basked in the sun all day. She realised that she probably owed him an apology for the shouting, because he was still her best friend, if nothing else.  
  
She set off in pursuit of the footprints with Mickey close behind. The Doctor hadn’t gone far away from the beach, standing in the hollow of a couple of shimmering dunes with the blue light of the sonic screwdriver reflecting off their jewel like brilliance. He tucked the machine away at the sound of their approach and looked back over his shoulder. She saw a slight flush rise to his cheeks as he took in her apparel before deliberately removing his eyes and she suspected he found her semi nakedness embarrassing.   
  
‘So,’ started Mickey, bounding up to the Doctor and flourishing his bucket and spade. ‘Where’s the crisis then? Someone stolen all the sunbeds? Planetwide ice-cream famine?’  
  
The Doctor shook his head, flustered, his eyes shooting to Rose and then fixing firmly on Mickey again. ‘Nothing like that. Just thought we — you — could do with spending some time together.’  
  
‘What, so there’s no big bad danger then?’ Mickey sounded disappointed. ‘No aliens? No mad robots?’  
  
‘None,’ came the definitive reply.   
  
Mickey snorted. ‘You’re not fooling anyone, mate.’ He wandered off to poke at the sand suspiciously with his spade.  
  
She took a step closer, wondering how the Doctor could fail to be too hot in his traditional jacket and jeans combination in the middle of a desert. She licked her lips and prepared to give him a second chance.  
  
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, jumping in first.  
  
She nodded, and gave him a direct stare. ‘I'm sorry too.’ She held out her hand. ‘Friends again?’  
  
He smiled fleetingly, and shook it. ‘Friends,’ he agreed. ‘Come and look.’ He turned, tackled the nearest red hill with confident strides. Hearing her scramble after him he waited until she caught up, grabbed hold of her hand and tugged her the rest of the way up the slope. ‘Like it?’ he asked, indicating the dune sea stretching away to the skirts of the mountains. ‘This is Cochinea, one of the safest places I know. I thought you’d like a day where nobody leaves anybody behind.’ He paused for a second, thinking. ‘Except if you go in the sea — then you’re on your own.’  
  
She looked back down the hill to where Mickey was determinedly digging in the sand. ‘You sure? Those shorts have come out of your wardrobe. You must have worn them sometime.’   
  
He mock shuddered. ‘A long time ago. In a galaxy far, far away.’  
  
‘So why are we here?’ she asked quietly, considering the landscape, that sense of something magical about it, precious, and yet somehow lost.

‘It reminded me of you.’  
  
She looked round at the redness of it all, crinkled her nose. ‘Ah — because of the colour — it’s rose.’ She didn’t much rate this suggestion, thought it might be quite a lame excuse for a visit.   
  
He removed his hands from his pockets, gave her a sidelong smile. ‘No, because it’s beautiful.’  
  
There was an awkward moment of utter silence in which she struggled to find an insult in that comment. Quickly, gently, his fingers skimmed a path down her bare back, as if he was going to put his arm around her and didn’t quite dare. She held her breath as she waited to see what he’d do next, making a point of not looking at him. 

‘I’d like us to start again,’ he said quietly. ‘I remember when we used to get on better than we do now. I haven’t been feeling like myself recently. But I meant what I said about wanting a second chance – I hope you can forgive me for leaving you. I promise I’m not going anywhere for a very long time.’  
  
Before she could answer, there was a shout from somewhere below. ‘Ha!’ yelled Mickey triumphantly. ‘I knew it. Who’s the idiot now? Told you there'd be mad robots.’  
  
Mickey was hauling something out of the sand, silvery grey, and metallic, like a discarded bucket with handles on both sides. His back half turned to the approaching Doctor, he upended whatever it was and let a river of red sand pour out onto the ground.   
  
Then he put it on. Turned around. ‘Hey Rose,’ he shouted, and his voice echoed strangely inside the helmet. ‘Exterminate.’  
  
The Doctor came to an abrupt halt. ‘Wrong mad robot,’ he muttered. ‘Try ‘delete’.’  
  
Rose caught him up, called out loudly. ‘That’s not a Dalek Mickey, that’s a...’ Her voice dropped. ‘What is that? Haven’t I seen it before?’  
  
The Doctor nodded, but he was paying almost no attention to her for a change. He swallowed. ‘In the museum. It’s a Cyberman. Part of a Cyberman anyway.’ He hit the bottom of the hill at a run, shouting, ‘Take it off Mickey.’   
  
Mickey was still waving his hands in the air grotesquely and the Doctor had to yank the helmet off him. Mickey was pleased with himself. ‘See — mad robots. Always with the mad robots. I bet they want to kill him too.’  
  
The Doctor’s reply was harsh with worry. ‘They’d kill you too if they had the chance. Actually, that’s not true. They’d cut out your brain, and they’d put it in here.’ He tapped the metal with a fingernail. ‘And you’d spend the rest of your life walking around wondering who’d stolen your legs.’  
  
Mickey ran a hand gingerly across his head. ‘Rose? Have I got brains in my hair?’ he asked sickly.  
  
Ignoring Mickey, Rose put her hand on the Doctor’s arm. ‘I thought you said this place was safe. What’s it doing here? And where’s the rest of it?’  
  
He examined the inside of the helmet carefully. ‘It hasn’t been used.’ He shook his head at Mickey. ‘No brains.’  
  
Mickey pointed a shaking finger at the hole he’d dug in the red sand but he didn’t seem able to speak. The Doctor approached the hole and took the sonic screwdriver back out of his pocket, thumbing the resonate setting. The dune in front of him heaved like some awakening beast, and a surprisingly small amount of actual sand poured down to puddle at its base. It wasn’t sand dune, not underneath.   
  
It was a rise, a hill, a mountain of steel.   
  
Hundreds of thousands of blank eyes that would never see stared back, hundreds of thousands of mouths that would never speak. He turned to the next dune, dumbly, pointed the blue light in his hand, turned to the next, and the next, and the next. He was surrounded on all sides by piles upon piles of Cybermen as yet unborn.  

He closed his eyes. ‘This can’t be happening.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Postman's Daughter and The Car Crash Bride by Sally Anne Palmer are available now on Amazon.


	14. Chapter 14

The phone rang. Completely out of place, its jaunty little tune disturbed the silence and Rose let it ring for a while, just watching the Doctor standing in a circle of his enemies as she’d seen him once before, with his eyes closed. He’d never looked so old. The phone rang again, and she had to kick the sand off the bag she’d dumped to rummage around inside. By the time she’d dug it out and blown off the red dust the phone had stopped ringing and switched to voicemail. Automatically, she dialled the number of her mailbox and she didn’t look away from the Doctor as he came back to life. Part of him came back to life anyway, although the light in his eyes that had shone so brightly when he’d looked at her at the top of the hill seemed to have been extinguished down here at the bottom.   
  
She had to listen to her mother’s message twice before she actually heard it. Then she had to listen to it a third time before she understood it. As quietly as she could she redialled, handed the phone to Mickey and told him to listen to the voicemail, before approaching the Doctor, still staring at the masses on masses of faces staring back.   
  
She tugged his sleeve. ‘We have to go back,’ she said clearly.  
  
He looked down at her, but she could tell that he wasn’t really seeing. The angles of his face were etched with a crimson tinge that had stopped being beautiful and had started to be sinister. His eyes reflected back at her blood-red. ‘There’s no going back.’ His voice was hollow and came from a long way away. ‘This is what happens when you try.’  
  
She didn’t understand and she tried to attract his attention, putting her hand up to his cheek. ‘No — we have to go back home. Now.’  
  
His eyes slid into focus as soon as her fingers met his skin but he didn’t move his head away or ask her what she thought she was doing. The texture of his face, the twitch of a muscle under her hand called to her somehow, spoke to something buried right down inside. There was a brief flicker in his eyes.  
  
As if sensing her confusion he pulled his head back, took a pace away swiftly. ‘Why?’ he asked.  
  
She shrugged, brushing her finger against her thumb, trying to rub away that tingle of familiarity. ‘Because that was my mum on the phone. Mickey’s gran’s been hurt in a fall. She’s in hospital.’  
  
Behind her, she could already hear Mickey’s footsteps disappearing rapidly in the direction of the TARDIS and she could only guess at what he was feeling.   
  
The Doctor frowned. ‘No. That’s not important now. I need to find out where all these things have come from.’ His disgust was self evident.  
  
She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand. Mickey’s gran’s been dead for five years.’  


There was a split second in which he froze, before exploding into a blur of movement. Scooping up her fallen bag he escorted her — there was no other word for it — with a hand underneath her elbow quickly back to the TARDIS, unlocked the door and followed her inside. He shot a single glance at Mickey and began punching co-ordinates. The ship disappeared faster than she could say abracadabra.   
  
Mickey paced. Mickey didn’t, as a rule, pace. Maybe shout sometimes, or run around waving his hands above his head, but pacing was not one of his usual behavioural characteristics. He walked round and round in circles. Stopped occasionally. Then carried on walking, and always in silence. After five minutes or so of this she was so tense she just wanted to get whatever was coming over with and she pushed herself off the railing to go and stop the endless pacing. She felt vaguely that she should be comforting him, although since his gran was alive and not dead, maybe celebrating would have been a better reaction. Mickey saw her coming, detoured, and stopped next to the Doctor, whose swift glance left her in no doubt that he just wanted to get it over with too.   
  
Mickey crossed his arms on his chest. ‘Alright, I admit it,’ he started, and his voice was thick. ‘I’m an idiot.’  
  
The Doctor didn’t stop pressing buttons, but he was clearly just waiting.   
  
‘You’ve said it enough and it’s true. I don’t understand. What’s going on?’  
  
When he replied, the Doctor’s voice was stripped of the condescending sarcasm he usually deployed whenever her ex was around. Although his response was neutral, she caught a hint of compassion beneath the surface. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.  
  
Mickey was clearly expecting something more. ‘And what?’ he asked. ‘That’s your best answer is it? How can my gran be alive?’  
  
‘I don’t know,’ repeated the Doctor again, maintaining the distraction of button pushing.   
  
‘But she fell, because I didn’t…I went to the funeral.’ His words were edged with tears. ‘Aren’t you going to explain?’  
  
The Doctor looked at him for a long time. ‘I can’t. I don’t have any answers. I don’t know what’s going on.’  
  
It was obvious to Rose that Mickey needed some answer, any answer, to stop himself flying apart.   
  
‘It’s because it’s me, isn’t it?’ he said, in a more bitter tone than she’d ever heard him use. ‘If it was Rose’s dad that had come back to life you’d be all over it. But I’m not special am I? And you know what?’ Mickey said loudly. ‘I’m sick of not being special. It isn’t good enough. This isn’t good enough.’ The sweep of his hand took in the TARDIS, the Doctor and the whole of time and space, and ended up with Rose herself. Mickey looked her deep in the eye. ‘My gran is more important.’   


The Doctor sighed heavily, but he wasn’t shouting, and he wasn’t angry or sarcastic - he just seemed sad. ‘Your grandmother’s the most important woman in the world,’ he responded at last. ‘And you’ve got her back. If I’d just found the most important woman in my world again, I’d be making sure she knew how I felt about her.’  
  
Shoulders back, his jaw squaring, she could see determination to find his own answer in the unfaltering stride that took Mickey across the room. ‘Good idea,’ he said. He didn’t look back.

‘Who is the most important woman in your world?’ Rose asked, already halfway to the doors. But before the Doctor could answer, they’d slammed shut in her face and the dematerialisation cycle had started. She wheeled around, marched up the ramp. ‘What the hell was that about? Take me back. Mickey’s really upset and I should be with him. And I need to pop in on my mum and let her know Mickey’s on his way.’

The Doctor pushed a few buttons in a desultory manner, then shrugged. ‘I can’t take you back. The TARDIS has locked the controls. I only just got her to land in the first place; she really hates your estate.’

Rose frowned at him. ‘Is that the best excuse you can come up with for not visiting my mother? Just unlock the controls again. This is your ship, I’m sure you can make it do whatever you want if you try really hard.’

He pulled a face. ‘Usually, yes. But the TARDIS and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms at the moment.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Why are you assuming it’s my fault? Why can’t it be hers?’ He gestured at the inanimate object in front of him.

Rose reached out and patted the console. ‘Whatever it was, it was your fault. What did you do?’

He stabbed a few more buttons. ‘It’s complicated. I’ll tell you later. The good news is I can’t find anything wrong with Earth, apart from the over population, global warming, the inequality, disease, poverty and the ability of its inhabitants to make random accusations. Whatever reincarnated Mickey’s grandmother left no trace.’  
  
‘So what do we do now?’

He rubbed a hand over his hair, tapped a finger on the console, threw her a brittle smile. ‘It doesn’t really matter. What do you fancy?’

His suddenly cheerful mood seemed off somehow, his smile fragile round the edges. She had a strong sense that he was hiding something. ‘But what do you think is wrong?’

He steepled his fingers, mimed an explosion. ‘Boom.’

‘Then why are you smiling?’ She was confused by the dire prediction and the beaming grin.

‘I’m not,’ he demurred. ‘This is a smile of pure naked terror. But it occurred to me that it’s just you and me alone on the TARDIS again. Let’s do something to celebrate.’

She perched on the edge of the jumpseat, watching him tap his fingers uncontrollably against the panel. ‘But what about boom?’ She did the action.

‘Forget it. Let me worry about it. Shall we go and meet Elvis?’

And when he smiled at her like that it made her so nervous she felt sick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer.


	15. Chapter 15

The queue for the solitary ladies’ toilet in the Ed Sullivan TV studios, New York, was so long it had enough internal mass to bend time and space. Rose knew this because the hands on her watch had slowed to a crawl, which was still quicker than the queue was moving. After ten minutes she’d taken off her coat and sat on top of it on the floor. After another ten minutes she’d removed her shoes and shaken out her hair because all those pins were starting to dig in and the hairspray was strong enough to scratch her face. After another ten minutes she’d started to daydream. Not so much daydream as day-have-a-really-erotic-fantasy-dream. Which was, she reflected later, the best sort of dream to have, if you couldn’t get anything else.   
  
She was sitting up, and her eyes were closed, and for a while she thought that the hands that were moving on her shoulders belonged to some overly friendly woman in the queue behind her before she realised she was on the edge of a high bed with her feet dangling above the floor and that she was completely naked. There was a faint earthy smell of damp in the air and it was really quite cold; from outside she caught the faint sound of horses’ hooves and quite possibly, bagpipes. She had the impression that it was early morning. Once again, she’d not been getting a lot of sleep.   
  
But the hands on her shoulders were telling her to forget all that, to forget anything but the way they pressed themselves into the awkward knots in her muscles, worked them loose, set her tiredness springing free and then smoothed it away. They were well educated hands these, whoever they belonged to, and they knew exactly how to touch her without being told. Strong fingers on her neck, thumbs caressing her spine as her head fell limply back and was caught on the shoulder of the man right behind her. She didn’t think she could have moved her body if she’d tried and the long, lingering sighs that drifted out of her lungs did so of their own accord.   
  
The hands slid down, over her shoulders, continuing their studies around her collarbones, the top of her chest. The weight on the bed tipped slightly, distributed itself in a different pattern as the owner of the hands came to sit right behind her. She wasn’t as chilly anymore, not with his legs on either side of hers, not with his chest propping her up as she sagged back against him. And the hands graduated onto a new course, began to teach her what else they knew about her body. There were fingers splaying over her breasts now, cupping them, raising them high, and then two thumbs at work on her nipples. Lips, imprinting gentle kisses on her neck and she was submissive, surrendered, abandoned to the whim of whoever was surrounding her, whoever was tracing a path down her stomach. Her hands were lifted from her lap, replaced on the hard thighs enclosing hers. Absently, she noticed a ring, shining golden on her left hand and wondered when she’d got married.   
  
Lips then, on her neck, one hand on her breast and the other stroking, stroking in the place between her legs. She was happy, in the dream she was happy, and then more than happy, clutching the legs that weren’t hers for support, arching her back and pressing against the stroking, stroking fingers that knew so much.   
  
A mouth breathed into her ear. ‘Did I mention that I love you?’

She bolted upright with a start, recognising the voice, although its owner had never said those words outside a filthy daydream.  
  
Another voice said, ‘Get on with it, darlin’.’   
  
That wasn’t a Northern accent. It wasn’t even an English accent, but some sort of American drawl, punctuated by the smack of chewing gum and a foot prodding her hip.   
  
She opened her eyes, and with not a little embarrassment realised that the entire queue was backed up behind her and that she was finally next for the bathroom. She scrambled quickly to her feet, moving with a bit more ease than usual and felt a warm flush rise on her cheeks. She hoped, as she opened the door, that she hadn’t been talking - or more probably moaning — in her sleep.   
  
She took a fleeting glance in the tiny square of chipped mirror and concluded that her mother had been quite right with the whole don’t touch or you’ll go blind warning. She couldn’t see her face. She could see her hair alright, and the top of her denim jacket, and the outline of her chin, but all her features just seemed to have vanished. Her eyes and her nose and her mouth had wandered off elsewhere like Mr Potato Head with only the potato. She blinked, deliberately, and her face popped back into being again, slightly flushed and a bit sweaty round the edges.

She was going to have to stop fantasising about him so much, Rose thought, staring at the back of the Doctor’s head as she shuffled back into the auditorium. The dreams she was having weren’t helpful, and if she wasn’t extremely careful, he was going to pick up on the fact that she was having them, sooner or later.

He’d taken two of the wooden chairs at the back of the hall, and was currently trying to defend the spare one next to him from an encircling sea of teenage girls. He was smiling at everyone, exchanging quips and comments and giving every appearance of being completely in his element, but Rose knew him well enough to tell that it was all a little forced. His behaviour reminded her that she was just another teenage girl to him, and wiped all erotic thoughts from her head.

He shifted his knees so she could get past, leaning close into the flushed young woman next to him.

Rose ignored that, arranged her flouncy skirt around her knees and elbowed him in the ribs. ‘Have you seen the stage?’

His smile dissipated as he considered the sign on the drumkit, the design flashing out from the side of the guitars, adorning the speakers and mounted on a round tin plaque suspended in front of the curtain. A blank, rectangular face, with round holes for eyes and bars on either side of the head. The image of the Cybermen was everywhere.

‘Of course. I’ve scanned, but there’s no sign of them. It looks like whoever made the backdrop has seen a helmet or two somewhere and decided it was a good promotional design. It isn’t an invasion, it’s advertising. Subtle difference.’

Ed Sullivan materialised from behind a curtain and began his introduction, to the accompaniment of an awed hush and some bated breath.

Rose leaned over to whisper in the Doctor’s ear. ‘But it’s bad, yes?’ She mimed the explosion with her fingers, and he nodded, unable to answer because the screaming had started.

A young, thin, surprised looking Elvis Presley appeared, along with his band, and the television cameras that would be broadcasting live to millions of people swivelled to face him. Elvis launched into Don’t Be Cruel and the crowd went wild. Although, because it was still the 1950s, they went wild while staying in their seats and not throwing anything.

Rose watched the show for a few minutes, noticing the volume around her increase with every hip gyration and suggestive thrust. She elbowed the Doctor again. ‘Now there’s a man who has moves.’

He leaned down. ‘I’ve shown you my moves,’ he said. ‘You liked my moves.’ For a brief flash of a second, there was something in his eyes when he looked at her, something soft, affectionate even, but it was smothered too quickly for her to be sure what it meant. Her finger itched for no very good reason.

‘Thirty seconds of Glen Miller doesn’t count as dancing.’ She was trying for humour but the banter fell flat somehow, tripped into seriousness by the change in his expression.  

‘I wasn’t talking about dancing.’ He flicked at a fingernail, glanced away, his original lightness of tone deadened by whatever emotion he was attempting to stifle.

Confused, it took her a few seconds to work out he must be talking about that kiss he’d inflicted on her when he came back through the fireplace, the same second-hand kiss he’d already given to Madame Tussaud. Anger flared, and she reached out and put her hand over the one he had clasped in his lap.

‘I didn’t like your moves that much,’ she said, and she squeezed his hand hard, dropped it, and backed away.

His expression changed, pain shooting across his features and he brought the hand she’d grabbed closer to his face. ‘Ouch.’

She jostled him roughly. ‘Oh, for goodness sake.’

‘No, I mean really, ouch. I’ve burnt my hand.’ He opened it to reveal a large blister which covered most of his palm.

She shrugged. ‘Sonic it. You have a setting that does a skin healing thing, you used it on me once.’

‘Same culprit as well,’ he agreed. ‘The TARDIS is really cross.’

Rose struggled with that. ‘The TARDIS has never burned me. Are you saying she did that to you on purpose?’

He retrieved the device from his pocket, passed it over the injured area a few times while she kept half an eye on the stage. He was still distracted when he said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

Elvis broke out into Love Me Tender and Rose watched the hip waggling for a little while, noticing that the cameras were fixed on his face so anyone watching at home would have missed out on some very enlightening manoeuvres. She kept her eyes away from the man still hesitating beside her, waiting silently for his explanation, swallowing down the bile that had rushed into the back of her throat.

He took a deep breath, ignoring Elvis completely.  ‘I think there’s something wrong with this timeline. I’m not sure it’s stable.’

‘Sounds serious.’ Rose relaxed, nodded, still watching the cameras, which appeared to be focusing on something that wasn’t Elvis at all. ‘I don’t know about timelines, but do you see anything wrong with that camera?’ She pointed in the direction of the stage. ‘The picture it’s broadcasting doesn’t look like Elvis at all, it’s some shouty blue woman. Look, there she is again.’

‘The red planet I took you to yesterday, Cochinea, should have been completely safe. The Cybermen have never invaded, they’ve never so much as been there on a day trip and they never will. I checked. I wouldn’t have taken you if there was any danger whatsoever. But all those bits of Cybermen must have come from somewhere.’

Rose half stood. ‘She’s on the other camera as well now. This is broadcasting, live, right? The people at home are going to miss it all, if she doesn’t get off the screen. Can’t you go and have a word?’

‘What I mean is, I think something might have ripped a big hole in reality and its imploding.’

‘She isn’t in front of the camera, she’s not on stage, I thought she was but she’s not. She’s inside the camera. It’s a massive malfunction. Come on, you’re good with machinery, come and mend it.’

She got to her feet, barged her way into the aisle and made for the front at a hasty trot.

The Doctor trailed behind her, complaining. ‘Have you been listening to a word I’ve said?’

‘Of course,’ she called. ‘Something bad is going to happen, but you’ve got an incredibly impressive plan to fix it.’

‘I didn’t say anything about a plan.’

She grinned at him over her shoulder. ‘Not yet, but you will do. Now sort out that camera.’

She had a quick word with the cameraman, and then caught the eye of the most famous pop star in the world, pointed at the camera with a thumbs down sign, and gesticulated at him to carry on. Behind her, she saw the Doctor scan the equipment, frown and then retrieve something from his pocket and clip it onto the side of the sonic. The normal buzzing sound increased in volume for a second, before, with a faint shrieking noise the blue woman on the screen disappeared into an arc of electricity that was sucked out of the screen and into the screwdriver. The Doctor checked a flashing green indicator on the side, then switched it off with a smug look, while Rose gave Elvis a thumbs up, and he reached the final few bars.

Elvis quivered his lip at her and uttered the immortal line: ‘Thank you very much.’

Rose felt the Doctor’s hand contract firmly around her elbow. ‘That’s enough moves for one day, young lady,’ he said, hauling her off in the direction of the TARDIS.


	16. Chapter 16

Rose was pleased to wake the next morning having had no inappropriate thoughts about her travelling companion at all, and skipped into the console room in a very good mood indeed. She had barely heard the explanation he’d been trying to give her about exploding timelines yesterday, but the nausea she’d experienced had been allayed by the fact that if he knew what the problem was, he’d also know the solution. He wasn’t the sort of man who would see a problem and then just walk away, he was constantly trying to fix things, whether they were broken or not. And if there was one thing she knew about the Doctor, it was that he always had a plan.

The Doctor was buried under a control panel, surrounded by tools when she arrived, enthusiastically hammering out his temper on an innocent looking bit of metal.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked, and he started up, bashed his head, and lay back down quickly, swearing.

‘The TARDIS decided I deserved a cold shower this morning,’ he complained. ‘But I’ve just made sure that won’t ever happen again.’ He walloped the panel with another few hefty blows, shuffled out of his hole carefully and got to his feet. ‘I’ve found an energy signature which could be related to whatever is affecting the timeline. We’ve already landed, just follow me and do exactly as I say.’

There was a harder edge to him this morning, Rose thought, following tense leather-clad shoulders out of the TARDIS doors and into a grotty sidestreet. The bags under his eyes told her he hadn’t had enough sleep, and the detritus littering the console room spoke of a long night and one too many wiring diagrams. He was worried, but he wasn’t the sort to openly admit it.

They had landed round the back of a restaurant, judging by the smell of overboiled cabbage in the air, the quantity and range of food scraps smeared all over the cobbles and the fact that an open door belched steam, swearing and the rattle of pans into the dingy alley. The Doctor hurried around the corner and pushed open a smoked red glass door emblazoned with the words ‘Satan’s Pit.’

‘Charming,’ remarked Rose as she surveyed the interior.

There were ten or twelve booths at the back, all but two occupied, and of those two, one held a man fast asleep with his head on the table, and the other was empty. The rest of the restaurant hummed with drinkers, clustered in groups around various tables, talking raucously and yelling at regular intervals. There was a distinct smell of vomit and alcohol in the air. Rose shuffled a little closer to the Doctor, noting the multi-eyed attention she was getting from the clearly inebriated crowd.

She was approach by an octopus in pyjamas holding out a politely spoken white ball. ‘Table for two?’ it said.

The Doctor nodded in the direction of the empty place at the back. ‘That’ll do.’

He let Rose precede him though the mob, and she was conscious of various outstretched hands that were quickly snatched back, lascivious stares that were dropped, catcalls that shrivelled up and died. The Doctor’s bad mood was as obvious to everyone else in the room as it was to her, one glance at his scowl confirming that getting in his way might prove dangerous, if not fatal.

After squeezing past the dirty table and reluctantly sitting on the sticky banquette, she scanned the room carefully, looking for any sign of Cybermen.

‘Are you always so busy?’ the Doctor asked their waiter, one hand still in his coat pocket, clearly thumbing the sonic screwdriver.

‘Oh no, sir,’ replied the ball. ‘But we currently have an excellent offer on our fermented beverage number two – an extra-large vessel half price, on condition that it is drained in one draft. Most of the customers here have tried the challenge, but only one person has succeeded.’ He nodded towards the sleeping man at the next table.

Rose took a better look at her somnolent neighbour. He was wearing trousers, but his chest and arms were bare, and completely covered in swirling tattoos, which looked a lot like writing, except that she couldn’t read it. She frowned, slightly disturbed by the implications of that.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked the waiter.

He shrugged, or at least his tentacles moved expressively. ‘He is not awake. Would you care to try the fermented beverage challenge?’

‘Why do you have to down it?’ asked the Doctor suspiciously. ‘Is it toxic?’

‘Oh no, sir,’ explained the waiter. ‘It’s the new tankards sent by the brewery, they don’t have a base so you can’t put them down. Look – there goes one now.’

Rose watched as another of the nightwear sporting cephalopods passed by, both hands clasped around the bars of an upended Cyberman’s helmet, while the helmet itself was full to the brim with a smoking brew.

‘And did those tankards arrive in a delivery consignment, or did you by any chance walk into a storeroom somewhere and find they’d just appeared?’

The waiter frowned, possibly, it was hard to tell. ‘They were delivered, sir,’ said his ball. ‘How else could they have come to be in the storeroom? Would you care to order from the menu?’ He gestured to the table top, which was displaying a selection of unappetising concoctions.

Rose pressed something that looked like porridge on toast with what was hopefully tea, and then waited for the server to complete the order and disappear. ‘Shall I stay here and wait for the food and you go and investigate the storeroom?’ she asked, her stomach rumbling.

‘In a minute,’ the Doctor replied, and she followed his gaze to find the man at the next table had opened his eyes and was staring at her intently.

‘I can’t read his tattoos,’ she mumbled out of the corner of her mouth.

‘Neither can I,’ the Doctor responded grimly. ‘The TARDIS isn’t translating. I’m going to have to have another word with her when we get back.’

‘You like these, little lady?’ The man rose from this seat, kneeled up on it so that he was leaning over the back of where Rose was sitting, close enough to reach out and grab her if he wanted.

He was built like a heavyweight boxer, enormous muscles flexing beneath the marked skin and a neck the size of a hefty tree trunk. The Doctor sat up straighter and sidled closer to Rose.

She stared at the man, recognising the need to be polite, rather than provoke him by refusing to answer. ‘What do they say?’

‘Ah well,’ he slurred, starting at his wrists and working up. ‘This one is Beelzebub, this one says Lucifer, this Mephi, Mephi, Mephistopheles, this one is Mara, Apophis, Heriafactum, Bogden, Seriator.’ He paused, waggling his eyebrows. ‘I can show you the rest if you want.’ He reached for the buckle on his trousers.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ the Doctor cut in. ‘She’s with me.’

The other man pulled a face. ‘For how long? An hour? Two? I’ll wait until you’re finished.’

‘Forever,’ the Doctor said firmly, although without looking at her.

The man frowned, checking Rose over carefully. ‘She doesn’t have a band,’ he complained. ‘If she’s not working she should have a sacrosanct band.’

‘She has a ring.’ The Doctor fished in his pocket for something, held it out in a cupped hand so she couldn’t quite see it. ‘She’s got an infection so she had to take it off.’

Both Rose and the tattooed lothario looked down at Rose’s hands, and at the angry red welt encircling the ring finger on her left hand, the result of all the scratching she’d been doing over the last few days.

The big man pulled a face. ‘You can’t blame for me trying.’

‘I can,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘Goodbye.’ He stabbed at a button on the table and a shimmering field appeared around the seating area, as their unwelcome guest turned back to his own table.

‘What’s that?’ Rose gestured at the object the Doctor was already replacing in his pocket.

He misunderstood the question. ‘Privacy screen, he can’t hear us and we can’t hear him. I should have mentioned that this is a pretty rough planet, I don’t come here much. It’s a recreation world for people who do long, hard jobs and don’t get a lot of holiday. Most of the female inhabitants are in the service industry, and available to rent by the hour. The ones who aren’t have to wear special jewellery - sacrosanct bands – for their own protection. We shouldn’t stay here long.’

Rose gazed absently at the next table where her potential buyer was busy ordering another of the helmet challenges. ‘So, I’m either a prostitute or your wife?’ she asked in a far away voice. ‘What a choice.’

There was something calling her from deep down inside that she couldn’t quite hear, a little voice whispering that something about this conversation was important. The hum of the sonic screwdriver and a familiar tingle in her finger drowned it out.

‘Let me look at that for you,’ the Doctor’s voice was brusque, and he kept his gaze on her hand as the skin around her ring finger healed, leaving no trace of whatever had been there before. ‘Don’t fuss with this. Try to forget about it.’ In a few seconds it was done, and he seemed keen to be off, shifting around the table and heading for the door marked ‘private’ to the left of the bar before she’d even moved.

She trailed him down corridors painted a deep red, the temperature as hot as hell as they approached the kitchen and getting closer to inferno as they went past it in search of storerooms.

Rose dithered along behind, still thinking. ‘Why is the TARDIS angry with you? Does it have anything to do with the timeline exploding?’

He opened another door and continued scanning. ‘Imploding. Big difference.’

‘But did you cause it? I can’t think why she’d be so angry with you otherwise.’ He kicked open the door of another room, while Rose put her back against the wall and waited for the answer.

‘I didn’t cause it. You did,’ he snapped, charging inside and retreating just as quickly.

‘I did?’ She racked her brains, flogged her memory, tortured her recollection but she couldn’t come up with a more serious error than forgetting he didn’t like sugar in his tea when she’d brought him a cup last night. ‘What did I do?’

He walked further away down the corridor and disappeared inside another room. ‘Got into trouble. I had to choose.’ His voice floated back muffled by heat, and walls and distance. ‘It was save the world or lose you. Again.’

‘And you chose to save me and destroy the world?’

‘Wrong decision. The TARDIS has pointed that out already. Now I’m facing a great big implosion and the end of reality.’ He’d moved so far away now she could barely hear him.

‘I don’t remember why I needed saving.’

‘Just forget it. It isn’t important anymore. Pretend it never happened.’ His voice died away, stifled by the roasting air.

She waited quite a while for something more, but she was answered only by silence and she became uncomfortable, shifting from foot to foot, checking her watch. A bead of sweat escaped from her forehead, made a break for freedom down her cheek. She checked her watch again, deciding that with his track record, five and a half minutes was about as long as she was prepared to wait. He wasn’t in any of the next few rooms along though, and when she entered a fourth one she found it opened out into a network of further corridors each with a fresh batch of doors to check.

She was up to the low double figures when she heard footsteps approaching and called out gratefully. ‘I’m in here.’

The heavy tread continued on until the dim light leaching in across the threshold was blocked, leaving Rose’s room in almost complete darkness. ‘Hello, little lady. You all finished?’

The words were even more indistinct than they had been before, the stench of spirits overwhelming in the small space. Rose felt a flicker of fear. The man was blocking the only exit and he was much bigger and stronger than she was, but he was drunk so she should be faster - all she had to do was lure him away from the doorway, dodge round him and run.

‘I’m not for sale,’ she yelled, hoping the Doctor was close enough to hear. ‘My husband will be back at any minute.’

The tattooed man laughed and the markings on his skin seemed to writhe in the darkness. ‘He looks at you like you’re his wife,’ he said. ‘But you don’t look at him like he’s your husband. You don’t belong to him, you’re available, and whatever you charge I can pay double.’

Rose swallowed hard, backed away until her shoulders hit the wall, and decided to stall. ‘I want payment in advance,’ she demanded. ‘In cash. Go and get it while I wait here.’

The man chortled. ‘Put it on my account. I’m sure I’ll be using you again.’ His hands dropped to his belt buckle and Rose slid along the wall while he was distracted, edging for the door.

Loosened trousers fell around the man’s ankles, leaving him standing in close fitting shorts, and he shook his shoulders as a dog shakes water from its fur. Rose was horrified to watch two hooked talons emerge from the base of his neck, talons which formed the tops of two vast, flesh coloured wings, spreading out from his back and extending from one wall to the other. She saw her ability to dodge around him evaporating.

He palmed himself through his underwear. ‘They call me Satan,’ he announced. ‘Welcome to my bar.’

In two short steps he was in front of her with his hands out, reaching for the front of her t-shirt and ripping it apart, leaving her bra exposed. Up close he smelled of unwashed bodies, alcohol and sex and she turned her head away as his hands groped towards her chest.

Then he crashed to the floor without another word.

‘Ready to go, darling?’ the Doctor asked politely, rubbing the fingers of his right hand. ‘I suggest we hurry, I compressed the blood supply to his brain but it won’t hold him for long.’

Rose leapt over the prone form in front of her, holding out her hand for the long run back to the TARDIS. ‘What is he?’ she gasped, adrenalin lending speed to her usual pace.

‘A Dominion. They attempted to colonise Earth once and I had to throw them out. You lot kept mistaking them for angels.’

It was only when she reached the threshold of the restaurant that she pulled up short.

The Doctor glanced down at her with a question, then appeared to notice the fact that her top was in tatters for the first time. ‘Should’ve hit him harder,’ he murmured, shucking off his jacket and holding it out for her to put on.

She folded her arms across her almost naked chest, unwilling to look him in the eye. He moved to stand directly in front of her and, with a knuckle under her chin, gently lifted her gaze. His eyes were steady, reassuring. ‘You’re safe now,’ he promised. ‘I didn’t come all the way back here to let you get hurt.’ And he looked at her for just a heartbeat too long, stared into her eyes with just a fraction too much concern, made a connection with part of her that had been lurking just under the surface.

Without thinking, she closed the distance between them, lifting her face for his kiss, and he took half a step away.

From behind, a muffled roar broke the sudden silence and the Doctor whirled into action, not stopping until they were back in the blue box of home.

She was nearly out of the console room before she remembered the purpose of the trip. ‘What did you find? Did you work out where the Cybermen are coming from?’

He nodded, picking up a discarded hammer and tapping it against his leg. ‘Yesterday when I scanned Cochinea and Earth they had nothing in common, so I stayed up the whole night and built a better scanner. But I needn’t have bothered, because this morning anyone with half a brain could find the same energy signature on both planets, as well as here on Bravura Minor and on half a dozen others I could mention.’

‘And that means?’

‘It means that whatever is destroying this timeline is getting stronger, or closer.’  
  
‘And that means?’  


He sighed, slumped onto the jumpseat, examining the floor. ‘It means I don’t have a lot of time left. A couple of days at the most before…’  


She waited, but his expression was distant. ‘Boom?’ she suggested.  
  
A faint smile touched his lips. ‘Before I leave you again.’


	17. Chapter 17

Rose was absolutely certain that something was going on. There was something she was not being told. Specifically, there was something the Doctor wasn’t telling her. She flung his coat down on her bed, threw the shredded t-shirt in the bin and went to shower the stench of fallen angel out of her hair.

 

She’d never really believed she was in danger, the Doctor was too close for anything really bad to have happened to her, but she didn’t much appreciate having her clothes damaged because of his tardy timekeeping. She washed her hair a few times, dried it, agonising for an unfeasible amount of time over what to wear, and then settled for sitting on the bed in her dressing gown.

 

There was definitely something going on, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. Of course, she’d been told she’d lost her memory, was responsible for whatever catastrophe was currently looming, and the Doctor didn’t seem too inclined to explain himself, but it wasn’t just that.

 

She rubbed at her left hand out of habit and then stopped and stared at it. _Couldn’t put her finger on what it was…_ She grabbed for the jacket slung over the duvet and shook out the pockets, pawing over the contents in search of whatever band the Doctor had shown her potential buyer earlier. It was obvious when she saw it, small, gold, incised with a swirling design and possessed of miraculous healing qualities, because when she slipped it onto her ring finger, the itching stopped immediately. Whatever had happened to her in the past, it had happened when she’d been wearing a wedding ring.

 

A vague theory formed in the back of her mind and, not wanting to subject it to any conscious thought, she picked up the coat and walked out into the corridor, taking whatever direction felt like the right one. Eventually, she paused outside a door, which looked just like all the other doors on the TARDIS, with no distinguishing features or noteworthy marks.

She turned the handle without knocking and went in.

 

He was sitting on his bed. It was a huge bed, with a couple of rumpled white sheets and the odd pillow and it didn’t look like he used it very much. The single bedside table was groaning with half assembled machinery and the floor around it bore the evidence of a hundred lonely nights in the form of nuts and bolts and spare parts. He gave her a hard stare but he didn’t question her right to be in his room; in fact, he shifted his legs closer together, making space for her to sit beside him.   
  
‘I brought your coat back,’ she said at length, and he nodded, without much enthusiasm. She took a seat next to him on the bed, caught the sudden shift of his gaze flashing up her legs as she rearranged the dressing gown. She broke the silence. ‘I don’t remember what happened. I don’t remember what I did.’

 

‘Tiny human brains,’ he responded with a shrug. ‘Too much information and they overload.’

 

‘Do you remember?’

 

He grimaced. ‘Every single second.’

 

‘And will you tell me what happened between us?’

 

It was a bold question, but she knew she was right. She knew it because while she might have no waking memory, she recognised the ring she was currently wearing as the one she’d seen in her dream, which meant those dreams had been memories, buried in the subconscious, but memories nonetheless. She remembered the way to his room, if she didn’t think about it too hard and she remembered him, as something more than a travelling companion. Her body did anyway, even if her mind couldn’t put it together. As she sat next to him on the bed, with the familiar scent of him in her nostrils and the sound of his breathing in her ears, she noticed her own respiration coming quicker, a faint flush warming her cheeks. It was the very beginning of arousal, of desire.

 

He attempted a chuckle, but it sounded more like an expression of pain. ‘If anything had happened between us, you’d remember, I promise. What makes you think it did?’

 

She waved her ring finger and its shiny burden at him and he shook his head.

 

‘Nothing happened. You and me – it’s impossible.’ He sprang off the mattress, marched to the door and opened it so hard it cracked against the wall, and then stood waiting.

 

He was lying. She knew beyond question that he was lying to her, the lie shining out of him in the way he tried and failed to meet her gaze, in the tapping of his foot on the floor, the exaggerated motion with which he folded his arms. He’d kissed her once, just after he came back though the fireplace, and on the red planet she thought he might try to touch her again, but since he’d started going on about the timeline failing he hadn’t made any overt moves on her at all. In fact, he’d moved away when she’d expected him to kiss her. But his eyes couldn’t lie, it seemed. There was something in the way he looked at her, something that escaped periodically from his rigid control, something that made her sure he was lying now.

 

He wanted her to leave, and she was tempted not to, for just a minute, tempted to make herself at home on his bed instead, to see what he’d do. But she had another vague theory that needed testing.

 

On the way out, as she was nearly past him, he held out his hand. ‘I’d like that bio-damper back, please. I might need it.’

 

She stopped short. ‘Bio-what?’

 

‘Bio-damper. You’re wearing it on your finger, but it’s just a spare part for the TARDIS.’ His throat worked as he struggled with the words. ‘I’d like it back.’

 

She covered the ring with her hand protectively, and stared at him in consternation. He was looking anywhere but at her, his eyes fixed on the wall behind her left shoulder. ‘But,’ she quavered, shaken by the request. ‘It’s mine. I don’t want you to have it back.’

 

His eyes swam into focus, his gaze sharpening, boring into her. ‘It doesn’t mean what you think it means,’ he grated out.

 

Her chin raised. ‘I think it does.’

 

There was one other person on board she could ask to tell her the truth, one other person who was not strictly a person, or strictly on board either. She tightened her belt and headed for the console room.

 

Once inside, she walked around the time rotor gingerly, uncertain how to strike up a conversation with an inanimate object, settled for resting her fingertips on the control panel and thinking the word ‘hello’ as loudly as she could. Just for an instant, from somewhere at the back of her mind she thought she heard laughter. Jerking her hand off the panel and cursing her own stupidity, she found the keyboard sitting in its usual place underneath the screen, the swirling blue screensaver spinning idle circles. She nudged it gently, and the circles disappeared, to be replaced by a list of words, one after the other, stretching halfway down the screen.

 

If the TARDIS hadn’t been a telepathic time machine, Rose would have sworn she was looking at a list of recent searches. The first few words on the list were familiar enough. _Emergency programme one_. That entry was greyed out and had a double line scored through it, with capital letters in bold next to it, just to make doubly sure: _DELETED_.

 

It was the next line that made her blood boil, and caused her to forget what she’d wanted to ask the TARDIS in the first place. _Emergency programme two_ , she read, and shortly after that _Emergency programme two (a),_ then _Emergency programme two (b)_ and on and on and on.

She was so furious, her hands shook too much to touch the keyboard. How dare he? How dare he be planning to do that to her again?

 

She gritted her teeth, stabbed at the return key hard enough to break it. Behind her, with a terribly familiar crackle and a buzzing noise, the hologram flickered into being, and she faced it, leaning against the console and crossing her arms.

 

Judging by the particular shade of jumper, emergency programme two had been recorded yesterday. ‘This is emergency programme two,’ it said. ‘Rose, stop shouting at me and listen. I know you’re not going to like this, in fact, I expect you’ll hate me forever for doing this to you again.’

 

‘No shit,’ she snarled.

 

‘But I don’t have a choice. This timeline is collapsing and it’s going to take me with it, but I promised to keep you safe, whether you like it or not. You’re going home. And don’t get any ideas about opening the heart of the TARDIS again either, because as soon as she lands, you’ll have thirty minutes to pack, and then the ship is set to self-destruct. Boom. A great big explosion. Get as far away as you can.’

 

Rose eyed the TARDIS speculatively, wondering if the ship was sentient enough to have a self-preservation instinct, which might explain the ease with which she’d found his little parting gift.

 

‘I don’t want you to remember me, or miss me, or try to do anything to find me again, just forget. Forget me, Rose Tyler.’

 

There was a pause in the transmission, a frown creased the forehead of the image and it scratched its head. ‘That’s not going to work. If I suggest she can find me again she’ll just come looking, like last time, she’s too bloody stubborn. And every time I tell her to forget she just asks more questions.’

 

The hologram reached out a hand and puttered into nothingness.

 

A few seconds later, the same crackle and hum heralded the arrival of a second hologram, standing in the same place as the first.

‘This is emergency programme two,’ it said.

 

Rose cocked an eyebrow at the TARDIS. ‘Really? He records these over and over until he gets it right?’

 

Above her, there was a faint wheeze and the green column moved slightly.

 

‘Rose, stop shouting and sit down. I’m taking you home. There’s no point arguing with me, you’ve been through this before, you know what to expect. But this time you won’t be able to come back. I’ve set the TARDIS to explode, a few minutes after you arrive, so get out and run for your life. I’m dead, as I should be, and that’s an end of it. Have a good life.’

 

There was a pause, and, the hologram ran a hand over its holographic hair, expelled a deep breath, and leaned back to rest its holographic backside against a holographic console. ‘I can’t finish it like that, not after everything we’ve been through. Maybe I should just tell her.’

 

The picture winked out, and was replaced almost immediately by a third. Rose went to sit on the jumpseat, aware now that this might take some time.

 

‘This is emergency programme two. The TARDIS is taking you home, Rose, but there’s a story I need to tell you while we get there, so take a seat. I may be a while. Once upon a time there was a stupid old man in a stupid blue box who lost everything. He was saved by a girl and he loved her so much he promised he’d always protect her, even at the cost of his own life. Well, one day she did need saving so the stupid old man died, and turned into someone else. But the girl wasn’t willing to let him go because she loved him as much as he loved her, so she came back in time and rescued him. That made the man very happy, because he got to spend more time with her, so one day, when he was feeling very brave, he asked her to come to bed with him. And you said yes.

 

But we didn’t have long together Rose, because after a while, time caught up with us, and I had to go back and die all over again. Except that I couldn’t do it. I loved you too much to let you go. And now this reality is disintegrating because I made that decision. I was going to tell you about all this before, but I realised how much harder saying goodbye would be for you, if you knew what we’d meant to each other. If you knew how much we’d loved each other. It’s better this way, it’s better if you can’t remember – you’ll forget what I’m saying to you now, it’s just words. But the way I feel, that’s not something I’ll ever forget. You couldn’t retain the memory, and I’m glad, because it means you can move on.

 

But I need to save you, this one last time. The TARDIS will take you home, and then she’ll self destruct. Don’t watch it. Walk away from me, from all of this. Go and be the fantastic person you’re meant to be. Leave me behind, where I belong.’

 

He was staring right at her, and she watched as his image rubbed its face roughly and then started shaking its head. ‘Too emotional. Too maudlin. I might as well have violins playing in the background.’

 

The hologram switched off. Then, a few seconds later, it groaned back into action again.

 

‘This is emergency programme two. Rose. I love you. Goodbye.’

 

But Rose had heard enough. She left the TARDIS to stop the playback and she headed back to her bedroom to decide what to do next. He had never had the shouting at he deserved.


	18. Chapter 18

She let the whole night and a good part of the morning pass before she saw him again, finally walking into the console room only when she was sure she had herself under control. He was braced on the opposite side of the rotor, tinkering with some kind of steering wheel and he watched her approach with a wary expression.

 

‘Where next then?’ she asked, pinning on a bright smile.

 

His gaze slid to her left hand, noting that she was no longer wearing the ring and he nodded. ‘Earth. London. 2012. Same energy signature, but stronger. If anything looks even slightly dangerous, anything at all, you come back here, don’t wait for me. Understand?’

 

She gave him a tight smile. The fatigue was etching deep lines under his eyes and he had a febrile energy about him that wasn’t entirely healthy as he strode out of the TARDIS ahead of her. She could see his hands were shaking slightly before he jammed them into his pockets. He’d parked on the corner of a modern housing estate, right next to a collection of road mending equipment and a portable toilet and she wondered vaguely if the ship would be pleased with that.

 

Two police cars and an ambulance were stationed outside an ordinary looking semi-detached house a few yards down the street. From out of the front door two paramedics manoeuvred a young girl on a wheeled stretcher, her head flopping around on the pillow and two tubes snaking out of her arms. She was no more than ten years old. Rose darted forward, concern blanking out any previous worries. ‘What happened?’ she asked a green uniformed nurse, who frowned at her. ‘I live just around the corner,’ Rose added, hastily. ‘I heard the sirens.’

 

The girl’s mother exited the house at a run, an overstuffed carryall with a huge teddy bear slung over one arm, keys in hand. Her attention flickered briefly over Rose before refocusing on her daughter. ‘She’s been seeing things in her bedroom. Monsters. This is all her father’s fault.’

 

Within a few seconds the girl had been lifted into the back of the ambulance, her mother clambering in after her and both of them were driven away at some speed. Rose glanced at the Doctor, but he was already approaching the open front door, psychic paper in hand.

 

‘Hello? Hello?’ he called.

 

A voice inside replied. ‘Sorry sir, I’m afraid you can’t. Oh, morning, Detective Chief Inspector, come to take over, have you?’

 

Rose followed, crossed the threshold and found the rest of the emergency services loitering awkwardly in the kitchen. The Doctor was already in charge. ‘So – what’s going on?’

 

The most senior of the uniformed officers flicked open a notepad and read carefully. ‘Chloe Webber, aged nine. Both mother and daughter already known to the police as victims of domestic violence – husband was a nasty piece of work. The daughter’s school called us in – kid’s been very disturbed in lessons, keeps shouting about monsters, says she’s seeing things to the extent that she needs restraining. School were concerned that Daddy’s back on the scene so we attended this morning, found the girl in her bedroom screaming about robots in the cupboard. Mother’s beside herself so we called an ambulance and the kid’s been sedated. Apparently, there’s been no sign of the father, but Mrs Webber says her daughter’s been having regular hallucinations over the last few days.’

 

‘Have you checked her bedroom?’ asked the leather jacket wearing detective.

 

‘It’s clean. Well, there’s a drawing of a robot in the back of the wardrobe but it’s in pencil – most likely the kid did it herself. She’s just having a breakdown. She probably needs counselling and a while to recover, she’s had a rough time by all accounts. We’ve referred the family to support services so they’ll get the help they need. Oh, can I help you ma’am?’ The officer had finally noticed Rose peering around the Doctor’s back.

 

She gave him the same fake bright smile she’d used earlier. ‘Hi. I live down the street. Mrs Webber called me to say she’d forgotten to pack any of Chloe’s pyjamas, she wants me to pick them up and drop them into hospital – is that okay?’

 

‘Sure, sure, go ahead.’ The policeman waved her towards the stairs.

 

‘Good report.’ The Doctor complimented the man he’d been speaking to. ‘I’ll have a quick look around then we can close this one down, okay?’ He followed Rose upstairs.

 

The house was tiny, Chloe’s bedroom so small there was barely room for a bed and a small wardrobe jammed in next to it, but the room was pink and soft and comforting, and it felt safe.

 

Rose put a hand on the wardrobe door. ‘Poor Chloe. Love can do such damage, can’t it?’

 

He ignored her, took the sonic out of his pocket. With the door open Rose could see that on the back of the cheap, white, chipboard panel resting against the wall, someone had drawn the outline of a robot. It was as tall as a man, more bulky, with the distinctive handles on either side of its helmet that she’d seen elsewhere. The drawing was in pencil, the outline roughly shaded, although as Rose stared at it she noticed that it wasn’t completely even – more defined in some places, sketchy in others.

 

She stepped back and let the Doctor continue his scan. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’

 

His shoulders hunched. ‘Is it anything like the question you asked me yesterday?’ he asked, with a note of aggression suffusing his voice.

 

‘I just wondered what the Cybermen have to do with the end of the world?’ He didn’t answer, so she went on. ‘You said reality is imploding, because you ripped a hole in it – what do the Cybermen have to do with that?’

 

‘That’s what I’m trying to work out.’ He sounded impatient.

 

She fiddled with the curtains a bit, thinking. ‘All the things we’ve seen so far have been small - it’s just helmets, not whole bodies coming through. That suggests that the holes are small too, doesn’t it? They aren’t big enough for the whole body. If the holes are small then can’t you patch them?’

 

He blew an impatient breath. ‘Try to see the bigger picture, if you can. We’ve found objects thousands of years and thousands of miles away from where they should be in time and space – which means that reality is being compressed. Like a… concertina. The Cybermen are coming through at the points where it touches. Eventually the whole thing will just collapse in on itself.’

 

Rose mulled that over for a while, but still couldn’t get it to make the right kind of sense. ‘But if you look at the details, not the big picture, then the only things that are in the wrong place are the Cybermen helmets, not the robots themselves. In fact, the biggest thing that’s out of place is Mickey’s gran.’

 

‘I’ve got more important things to worry about than your boyfriend’s grandmother,’ he snapped. ‘The point isn’t what’s coming through – could be Cybermen, could be dogs with no noses for all I care – it’s that anything is coming through at all. This timeline is ending and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

 

She gave a casual shrug. ‘Sounds like you want it to end.’

 

His fingers clutched the screwdriver so hard they went white. ‘Is that what you think?’

 

‘What am I supposed to think? You’ve told me this reality is ending but you’re not doing anything about it – all you do is scan. I built a scanner, I scanned a wardrobe. You’re obsessed with finding out when this big explosion thing is going to happen, but you don’t seem to be doing a lot to stop it.’

 

‘I’ve already done everything I can think of. I went back, I broke all the laws, I changed the timeline to fix this, but it won’t stay fixed. This chain of events just wasn’t meant to be.’ He dropped the screwdriver back into his pocket with a grimace.

 

She stepped into his personal space, laid a hand on his arm, pressed herself against him and looked into his face, but he avoided her gaze. ‘And you did all of that to save me, didn’t you?’ she asked, her voice soft now, coaxing. ‘Why did I need saving?’

 

A sigh escaped his chest, and his blue eyes were a violet bruise. ‘Because you fell in love with me,’ he said, and then he was gone, striding past her.

 

That was only half the answer she wanted. She took a final glance at the drawing, and then bent closer, curious. There was something wrong with the back of the wardrobe, for a start. Rose had enough experience with cheap, flat pack furniture to know that it wasn’t usually so incredibly smooth, or so brilliantly white and neither did it usually appear to be glowing from the other side. She squinted at the head of the robot, noticing again the strange precision and blurring of the different parts of the picture. The feet showed the same pattern - as if the artist hadn’t been certain of what she was sketching. But when Rose returned her scrutiny to the hands she scrambled backwards in shock, putting out a trembling finger.

 

The Doctor paused in the act of walking away.

 

‘It’s moving,’ she whispered.

 

He was at her side in a single leap.

 

‘Look at the hand, the right hand, look really closely, memorise the bits that are sharp in the drawing and the bits that are faded, then do the same thing with the left foot. Then look at the hand again and tell me what you see.’

 

He did as he was asked, frowned, then took out the sonic for another scan, finally stepping back so they were standing side by side. ‘It’s not just moving,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s walking. It’s coming closer.’

 

Rose groped for his hand, held it tight as a cold fear gripped her stomach, pushed its fingers through her chest and made her shiver. She took a deep breath. ‘Then, this is the end.’ She was proud of how calm her voice sounded. ‘We’ll face it together. I’m never going to leave you.’

 

His fingers stilled in her grasp, before he wrenched them away with an abrupt jerk. ‘This isn’t the end. You’re going back to the TARDIS.’

 

‘So you can send me back home with emergency programme two? You don’t get to decide what I do with my life. Who do you think you are?’

 

He was silent for a long moment. ‘You’ve seen the recordings.’ There was a sick twist to his lips as he spoke.

 

‘Yeah. The TARDIS played me the programme, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want you to blow her up and she’s trying to get me to stop you.’

 

‘I didn’t mean what I said.’ His voice was too loud and too harsh in the little pink space. ‘Some of it wasn’t even true.’

 

‘For goodness’ sake.’ She put her back to the open wardrobe, facing the Doctor square on and rested a hand on his cheek to make him look at her. His blue eyes held embarrassment, anger, but there was something else in the way he looked at her far stronger than them both. Her body recognised it, returned the emotion in a heady rush of warmth.  ‘Of course it’s true. I don’t need to remember sleeping with you to know that.’ She traced his cheekbone with her thumb, used her fingertips to re-learn the shape of his eyebrow.

 

His eyelids flickered shut.

 

‘But you don’t trust me with the truth,’ she murmured, and his eyes popped open again. ‘And you don’t respect me enough to let me make my own decisions.’  Her hand fell away, and her voice took on a hint of the anger that had kept her awake all night. ‘You treat me like a child. You make decisions for me. You try to be so noble, so self sacrificing, but whatever you feel for me isn’t love. It isn’t equal. It’s all big gestures and violins. That isn’t the sort of love I want. I want you here, with me, every day, and nothing more than that.’

 

‘I had to save you,’ he whispered.

 

She shrugged. ‘I’m not the only one who needs saving. We don’t have much time left, certainly not enough for arguments. We should be facing our problems together, side by side. I don’t mind if the end of the world is coming as long as I’m standing next to you when it does. But you don’t feel the same. You’d rather send me away than find a way to fix this. Something is coming. Something that might separate us forever. Surely now is the time for us to be together.’

 

He shook his head, said flatly. ‘It will be easier for you to say goodbye if we’re not.’

 

She put a hand on his arm. ‘I’m not going to say goodbye. I’m going to face this with you. Today, and tomorrow and for however much longer we have left I’m going to carry on getting up in the morning and facing this with you because that’s what love is. It’s ordinary. It’s domestic. It carries on, even when everything else is lost. You always find a way to save the world. I believe in you. I love you. And that gives me hope.’

 

Abruptly the lines furrowing his forehead smoothed out and he gave her a sparkling look. ‘And no one can live without hope. You’re absolutely right,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

 

Then his hand sought her cheek, thumbing the curve of it a few times before his fingers dived deep into her hair and knotted at the nape of her neck, pulling her head back. His other hand slid swiftly about her waist, crushing her into him and then he stooped towards her and she was being kissed.

 

He buried his tongue in her mouth, plunging inside in a sustained flurry of powerful, assured strokes that hit sensitive spots she didn’t know she had and made her clutch at him for support. She opened her mouth a bit wider, tilted her head and with only that minimal encouragement he increased his pace and pressure, his hand splaying over the back of her jeans to bring her hips into tight proximity with his. He was breathing hard, and she could feel the wild pounding of his hearts through her chest, his fist clenching and releasing in her hair, running down her back and then cupping the back of her skull, adjusting the angle of her head so that her mouth opened wider.   


He launched himself into her, poured the repressed emotions of the last few days into his kiss, and in the end it wasn’t the movements of his tongue in her mouth that made her tremble, but the thought of all that desire, all that love directed towards her that had her hanging off his shoulders.

 

She was aware of a voice outside the bedroom door, a booted footstep on the landing. ‘Are you finished, Chief Inspector?’ called one of the policemen from the response team.

 

The Doctor dropped her and stepped back, but the smile he gave her was predatory, all teeth and hunger. ‘For now,’ he replied. ‘Just one more thing to sort out.’

 

She collapsed onto the bed, her lips bruised, her mouth still flooded with his taste. Her body was throbbing for his touch, her knickers already damp, nipples trying to cut their way out of her bra, a light sweat on her forehead and a flush on her cheeks.

 

He traced the outline in the wardrobe with the wrong end of the screwdriver and when he glanced at her, a grin spread over his face that he didn’t seem able to control.

 

‘Are you deleting it?’ she asked, still recovering.

 

‘Erasing it,’ he corrected. ‘It’s only pencil, after all.’  


‘So, your superior alien technology comes with a rubber on the end?’

 

‘Yep.’ His grin stretched wider. ‘It’s definitely a good idea to be making smart remarks given what I’m going to be doing to you in about oh, half an hour.’

 

She caught his mood, smiled back. ‘I’m leaving. I have clothes to deliver to hospital, remember. And I need to go and visit my mother, since you refused to let me see her earlier.’ She flourished her watch. ‘I’ll be back in about five and a half hours.’

 

‘Definitely a good idea given what I’ll be doing to you, in half an hour, on the console.’  


Her mouth dropped open. ‘On the console? You wouldn’t.’

 

He gave her one of his best, most smug, most annoying smiles. ‘I already have.’

 

She fled, pushing past the policemen on the stairs while pretending to be carrying an armful of something, listening to the Doctor attempting to extricate himself from the remaining police procedure as quickly as possible.


	19. Chapter 19

She only slowed down when she was back at the TARDIS, passing through the console room at a determined run, pausing between a choice of bedrooms. His was large, cold and covered in machinery, whereas at least in hers she knew there was a box of tissues on the bedside table to mop up any spillages. She headed for her own room, wishing she hadn’t had the thought about the tissues. Or the spillages. There was a fluttering in her stomach that felt suspiciously like nerves, and she tried to push it away.

 

Her bedroom didn’t look like anywhere you’d go to seduce a lover though, or anywhere you’d go to be seduced, and she spent some time picking up clothes off the floor and shoving them in wardrobes. She hid the photos of Mickey and her mother, and then decided the sheets could do with a wash and was halfway through changing them when she became conscious that he was standing in the doorway. He’d removed his coat, and was propped against the frame with his arms folded and legs crossed. All the suppressed desire in his expression had faded away, and he just looked kind, as he stood there watching, kind and familiar.

 

‘So,’ he said when he had her attention. ‘Where do you want to start?’

 

‘Oh.’ She was flustered by the directness of the question. And she was flustered by the fact that he was nearly in her bedroom, and by the fact that she’d been kissing him not half an hour ago, and by the fact that he wasn’t doing anything but gaze at her, unmoving.  She twisted the fabric of her jeans. ‘I thought you could start by touching me, that usually works, and then I could…’

 

He waved a hand, cutting her off. ‘I don’t need instructions. I meant, do you want to go out to eat first, or see a movie, or go dancing? Or I know where there are some really good fireworks?’

 

All she heard was ‘first’. She swallowed. ‘Whatever you want.’

 

He stepped forward, reached out and took her hand, stroking the back of it. ‘I want you to stop being nervous. What happened to the girl who just shouted at me about love and hope? We’ve done this before, you and I.’  


She shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

 

He gave her a soft smile. ‘Then let me tell you how it happened. First, I kissed you - like this.’

 

He bent forward, and put his mouth on hers, and it was gentle, and light and slow. He brushed her lips with his until she relaxed a little, touching the corners of her mouth with tiny, tentative touches, encouraging her to trust him. A light push, a touch of firmness as his mouth descended once, pressed against hers and then moved away. He came in again and she could feel that his lips were open this time, and that he left something of his taste behind when they separated. He didn’t force it, didn’t demand an entry with the pressure of his tongue like last time, just kissed her with an open mouth while she thought about kissing him back.

 

She could feel how close he was, leaning into her, his hand on her waist, his thumb dancing circles against the fabric of her top. His tongue in her mouth. His tongue in her mouth doing wonderful things that made her too dizzy to do more than tilt her head back and moan quietly to herself in the back of her throat. He kissed her like he’d been training for it all his life. Hot sweeping rushes against her tongue, deep stabbing strokes, slight, teasing flicks that taunted her to respond. He kissed her like he’d kissed her before, like he knew exactly what would make her shiver and exactly how to build those shivers into shakes.

 

He released her lips, created a distance between them. ‘Then I asked you to come to bed with me.’

 

There was so much wonder, and pride and sheer happiness in his eyes that her nerves were silenced, stilled, and her heart took over. ‘I said yes.’

 

‘You did. Although you were a bit more enthusiastic about it last time. So I took you to my room, and there was romantic music in the background, and soft lighting and scented candles, some of those, and flowers, definitely flowers. Flowers everywhere. And you were so impressed at all the effort I’d gone to that you kissed me. Like this.’ He stood there waiting.

 

She was shaking her head even as she stepped forward. ‘That isn’t what happened.’

 

‘You definitely kissed me.’ A smile played around the edges of his mouth.

.

‘The rest of it, I meant. The scented candles. I don’t think you even know what a scented candle is.’ She put a hand in the centre of his chest for support, her heart banging against her ribs, and stretched up on tiptoe.

 

‘It was always like that in my imagination,’ he answered.

 

She kissed him and his hands settled lightly on her waist, holding her in place. He opened his mouth a touch and she flicked her tongue between his lips, feeling him relax as she explored the hard lines and soft crevices with a tentative attention. A sigh escaped his throat, a tiny groan not far behind and she repeated the actions she’d been practising, surprised to hear another little sound of encouragement. She felt her hesitation dissolve, and she slid a hand down his chest, fingers questing for the hem of his jumper, finding it, and then creeping inside. His stomach quivered as she glided up it, coming to rest with a palm pressed tight against his flesh, her fingernails grazing over the smooth circle of his nipple.

 

He broke the kiss, looking down at her with serious eyes. ‘I like that.’

 

This time his directness didn’t fluster so much as excite her and she passed her nails across his torso again, giving a flick and a tight squeeze, revelling in the sharp breath he sucked in. She slipped her other hand beneath his clothing, counting the muscles in his stomach, feeling the sparse hair, seeking out a companion for the taut little button under her fingers. She found it, touched it, and he gasped.   


She tried to match his feral smile, fisting her hands in the wool of his jumper and hauling it over his head. He stood there naked to the waist as she examined him with eyes and exploratory fingertips, finally meeting his blue-eyed stare as she set her lips to his chest.

 

‘I’ve missed you,’ he said, and there was a welter of emotion behind the simple words.

 

She teased his nipple with her tongue, and then took it between her teeth. His moan made her shiver and she was conscious of his hands curling into tight balls as he held himself still. Deliberately, she reached down and put a hand on the front of his trousers, all thought of nerves lost in the control she had over his reactions, the power to make him gasp, or moan, and, in the not too distant future, beg and shout. She exerted a light pressure against the solid bulk beneath her palm and raised her eyebrows at him, halfway between a lick and a nibble.

 

He nodded slightly. ‘I like that, too.’  

 

Her fingers went for the button of his jeans and he bent down, cupped her face in both hands and raised her out of her stooping position, possessing her mouth with a bruising intensity.

 

She unzipped his fly.

 

He pushed his tongue down her throat.

 

Her hand toyed with the waistband of his underwear.

 

His fingers slid up her back and underneath her top, and unhooked her bra.

 

She invaded his privacy, felt curly hair, inched lower, and took a firm grip.

 

He shuddered into her hand, and then pushed up the front of her t-shirt, flicking aside the fabric in his way and cupped a breast in each palm.

 

She kissed him back, fiercely now, as the rough calluses on his thumbs brushed across her sensitive flesh and it hardened at the contact, eliciting a groan from her throat. Her hand tightened convulsively around him, and then began to move.  Long, slow strokes at first, all the way from base to tip, but with enough strength behind them, enough of a twist at the end to have him bucking his hips forward into every pull.

 

She increased her speed. He squeezed her breasts.

 

She took a minute to decide whether she should attempt the obvious next step, or let him lead, and then another one of those delicious groans echoed in her ears and her mind was made up. She stepped out of the kiss, and opened her eyes, delighted to see the sweat standing out on his forehead, the flush that extended down his neck, the dark wash of arousal in his gaze. She flung her top over her head, chucked it, and the redundant bra, onto the floor and noticed his eyes cling to every revealed curve and hollow, his reddened lips open as if to speak.

 

She took a quick pace forward before he could reach for her, jerked down his trousers, and kneeled at his feet. She explored him with her eyes, prior to exploring him with her mouth.

 

‘Actually, I don’t like that,’ he croaked, his voice strangled.

 

She rubbed him a few times, thumbing the bead of moisture that meant he did like it, rather a lot.

 

‘I think you should stop now, yes, definitely a good idea to stop exactly now, don’t…’

 

She sucked him into her mouth and the next sound he made was something like ‘nnnggh.’ She re-learnt the taste of him, the texture, the smoothness and the ridges and then she inched forward slowly until he touched the back of her throat, before pulling back in a rush, just to see what he’d do. His eyes were closed, his chin tucked into his chest, an expression almost of pain twisting his face and she wondered if he really didn’t like it, after all. She went down on him again, this time using her tongue to stroke a long trail up the underside of his length, finishing with a few forceful licks on a spot just beneath the head of his erection. Without any warning at all, his hips surged forward, stuffing her mouth uncomfortably full of engorged Time Lord and coating her throat with his orgasm.

 

She sat back on her heels, coughing.

 

‘Sorry.’ His cheeks were a fetching shade of scarlet. ‘I like that too much.’

 

She wiped her mouth. ‘Is it always so quick?’

 

He tucked himself away, bent down to grasp her elbows and hauled her back to her feet. ‘It is not always ‘so quick’. In nine hundred years it has never been ‘so quick’. But you wouldn’t leave it at the scented candles, would you?’

 

He was making short work of removing her jeans, yanking the denim around her knees and carelessly pushing her knickers down on top, reaching out to pull the tangle free from first one leg, then the other. She chuckled at his embarrassment, allowed him to strip her and then tumble her backwards on to the bed with a single finger.

 

‘The first time we did this was a complete disaster – not as bad as what just happened, mind you – but pretty bad. I’d dismantled a dishwasher on my bed and the whole thing stank of oil and sprouts. Then I tried to take your clothes off and I fell on you, nearly knocked you out. Afterwards, you were so cold that I had to go and fetch a blanket and when I got back you’d fallen asleep.’

 

He flopped onto the bed next to her, reached up to grab three pillows. ‘These go under your hips.’

 

He offered her two, and she arched forward, rested her pelvis on the requested support. ‘And that one?’ she asked.

 

‘Keep it handy. You can get really loud when you start screaming – if I nod, put it over your mouth.’   
  
She threw it at him instead. He kneeled at her feet, put a hand on each knee and spread her legs wide, spending a few moments just looking at her, naked and waiting. She found the scrutiny arousing, although not quite as exciting as the thought that the Doctor was about to put his tongue between her legs – that image had her squirming on the pillows. He arched an eyebrow in amusement, then settled between her feet, using the appendage she was fantasising about to lick the sole of her right foot instead, popping her big toe into his mouth. That was nice, Rose concluded, but it wasn’t oral-sex nice.

 

‘Of course, bits of the dishwasher did come in useful later,’ he continued, in a conversational tone, turning his attention to her right ankle, peppering it with delicate kisses. ‘There was a small clamp you were particularly fond of, as I recall.’

 

He inched his way up her calf, turning slow circles with his tongue to cover every square inch of flesh, which took him at least twenty minutes. That was also nice, Rose decided, but not  holding-onto-the-back-of-his-head-as-he-licked-her-into-orgasm nice.  

 

He kissed the inside of her right knee, adjusted the angle of her leg to make more room and lay down. Then he began to explore the skin of her thigh with hands and tongue and quite a lot of stubble which took an additional thirty minutes. That was nice, Rose thought, somewhat frantically, but it wasn’t grabbing-hold-of-his-ears, forcing-his-head-between-her-thighs-and-coming-all-over-his-face nice.

 

By the time he was finally within touching distance of her clitoris, she wasn’t able to control the rise of her hips off the bed, and she’d already shuffled forward as far as she dared without her backside falling off the edge of the pillow. He put a hand on each thigh, spread her even wider, his head dropping into position.

 

‘The main lesson I learned from that night though,’ he murmured, so close now she could feel his breath warming the intimate recesses of her body as she yearned towards him. ‘Is that you like to take it slowly.’

 

And he crawled back down to her left foot and started all over again with her sole. She nearly cried with frustration.

 

‘I’m joking.’ His knowing smile appeared again in her sightline and he put his mouth where she most wanted it to be.

 

Rose didn’t have time to quantify how nice that was, because she was too busy gasping, her mind focusing entirely on what his tongue was doing to her, how it rubbed, and circled and flicked between her legs. Her eyes shut tight as the almost instantaneous climax shook her, all anticipation and shivers, but when it was over she realised that he hadn’t stopped.

 

His mouth had withdrawn, but a finger had replaced it, repeating a hard/soft up/down alternating motion with a lazy assurance and as soon as he noticed her eyes were open again he slipped a finger inside her. The angle of that finger, and the angle at which he’d positioned her hips seemed designed to operate in tandem because the penetration, as shallow and gentle as it was hit a deeper pleasure centre, sending ripples of heat pulsating through her groin.

 

‘The other thing I found out that night,’ he continued, after a period in which her body started rising in line with his rhythmic strokes. ‘Is that you can do this six times in a row.’

 

He inserted another finger, deeper this time, his hand beginning to move more rapidly, to penetrate further and harder and Rose found she couldn’t draw enough breath to dispute his claim. A third finger took her beyond the capacity for conscious thought, lost in the strong push and pull of the left hand buried inside her and the delicate syncopated pattern danced by his right that slowly came together until she was hovering on the edge of the most almighty climax. Then he withdrew his fingers and thrust his tongue into her instead and she cried out, arching off the bed into an orgasm so intense it was almost painful.

 

Eventually, she managed to pry open glazed eyes to find that she was flat out on the bed and he was he was poised above her, braced for entry. He nodded at the discarded third pillow. ‘You’ll probably need that now.’

 

Then he pushed forward and she welcomed him home.

 

 


	20. Chapter 20

When Rose woke the next morning she was cocooned under her duvet, a set of rangy limbs pinning her to the bed, a man’s snoring rattling her eardrums. There was something terribly domestic about this situation, just waking up in bed next to the man she loved, but it was so special she took care not to disturb him, wanting to enjoy his presence for as long as possible. He was a revelation in the bedroom, but actually she was more surprised at herself. She had a capacity for pleasure that astounded her, a willingness and an energy that matched that of the nine hundred year old alien lying exhausted in her bed. Whatever he gave her, she could take and give back more in return, and if he had a bold or outrageous idea she was happy to try it, and then suggest something of her own.

 

He snorted, scratched his head and then reached out blindly to fumble for her breast, before disappearing back into dreams. She turned over gently until they were lying face to face, sharing a pillow.

 

His eyes flickered at the movement, and his mouth formed a sleepy smile. ‘Morning.’

 

She reached out, pressed her palm to his cheek, caressed his skin, just because she could. His smile widened a bit more, but his eyes stayed closed and he flailed an arm around until he found her back and hugged her close.

 

‘I love you,’ she said.

 

‘I remember,’ he murmured.

 

She trailed her hand down his shoulder, felt along his arm, found his hand and squeezed it. ‘What are we going to do now?’ she asked him.

 

His eyes opened, full of an easy warmth that bore no hint of concern, and he gave her a reassuring smile. ‘What we always do. Run. I’ll set a course as far away from Cybermen and energy signatures as possible and we’ll let the timeline collapse on its own.’

 

A tear escaped unbidden from the corner of her eye, tracked a path towards her chin. ‘How much time do we have?’

 

He lifted a shoulder. ‘Not enough, as always.’

 

‘And isn’t there anything you can do?’

 

He followed the course of the tear with a fingertip, wiping it away. ‘I tried that already. I thought I’d made a fixed point, changed events permanently, but I was wrong.’ His smile became almost self-deprecating. ‘Even I’m wrong sometimes. But something might come up. Let’s hope that it will.’

 

‘And you won’t leave me?’

 

He stroked her cheek, tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. ‘Never. And I won’t send you away either. Whatever happens, we’re together.’

 

‘Until the end.’

 

‘Til death do us…hang on.’ He rolled away, scrabbled for something on the bedside table then extracted her hand from under the covers and slid it onto her ring finger. ‘There,’ he said proudly. ‘Til death do us part. And I’ve already died once, so it’ll have to try harder than that next time.’

 

She laced her fingers with his and snuggled into his side as his other arm came around her shoulders, pulling her tight. She lay, just listening to him breathe and trying to imprint the moment onto her memory, in case she woke up tomorrow and had forgotten him again. Eventually though, his foot began to tap under the covers and his fingers beat out a merry pattern against her arm.

 

‘Time to get up,’ he announced, to her complete lack of surprise. ‘Can’t lie around in bed all day.’

 

‘Why not?’ she pouted.

 

‘Because I want you to have a shower with me. Come on.’

 

He didn’t leave her alone in the shower, although the water had run cold by the time he’d finished ravishing her against the tiles. He didn’t leave her alone while she was getting dressed either, stripping off her underwear as fast as she could put it on. He only left her alone when she informed him she needed to use the toilet and he wasn’t allowed to follow her in there. He went to find fresh clothes instead and she beat him to the console room, finding the space more green tinged than usual, and significantly colder.

 

She approached the control panel with confidence initially, although her feet echoed on the metal floor and all the little noises the ship usually made seemed to have stilled into silence. The swirling screensaver was blank and dead, and the running lights had been switched off. Rose reached out to touch the grey metal, then stayed her hand, disturbed by a faint memory of remembered pain that made her fingertips tingle. She backed away and sat on the jumpseat instead, rubbing her arms against the chill and wishing that the man who said he’d never leave her hadn’t left her.

 

He bounded into the room a few minutes later, grinning wildly and punched a few buttons without paying much attention, finishing with a ring on the ridiculous bell he was so fond of. The ship shuddered briefly, then the rotor wheezed into active life and a couple of seconds later the dematerialisation cycle initiated and shut down again just as quickly.

 

‘Where are we?’ she asked, glancing around at the emerald light pulsing through the walls.

 

He gestured grandly at the doors. ‘The restaurant at the end of the universe. It isn’t really at the end of the universe, but the restaurant at the arse end of nowhere didn’t have the same ring. It has a very good view and does a mean steak. I have a permanent reservation.’ He flipped his hand. ‘Off you go and take a look.’

 

She eyed the walls suspiciously. The temperature was now so cold she could see her breath in the air and the throb of light had intensified, a jade heartbeat banging against her eyeballs. The Doctor didn’t seem to have noticed.

 

‘After you,’ she said.

 

He shrugged, clumped down the ramp and pushed the doors wide. The minute he’d exited the ship the engine noise cut out and all the lights failed, plunging Rose into darkness only punctuated by one square of brilliant white light. She folded her arms, feeling nausea that was instantly familiar rise in her guts. The Doctor’s silhouette appeared in the doorway and he strode over to the console without speaking and kicked it hard.

 

‘There’s something wrong.’ Rose didn’t bother to phrase it as a question, she could tell by the murderous expression on his face, the way he started slamming a steering wheel on the console to one side repeatedly. He marched around to the keyboard, typed away at it urgently to little effect then hit the heel of his palm against a certain point on the metal structure and the panel which concealed the heart of the TARDIS swung open slowly, revealing an empty, dark space. He fumbled in his pocket, retrieved the screwdriver and pushed a few buttons but the blue light at the end didn’t activate and the tool was silent and dead.

 

Rose picked herself off the seat, paced slowly towards the doors to see what kind of trouble she was in. On the other side was a bare white room, with a lever on either side, a couple of computers, an upturned chair or two and a deserted office. There weren’t any people, and little sign of their presence, other than a half-drunk cup of coffee, still warm.

 

She approached the blank wall beyond the levers slowly. There was a smoothness about it, a luminescence that was familiar but it wasn’t entirely clean. The closer she got, the more sure she was that someone had been drawing on it.

 

‘Where are we?’ she called, stepping closer to the wall.

 

‘Look out of the window,’ he yelled, amidst a chorus of shrieking metal.

 

Rose turned in the direction of the window instead. She was somewhere high up, looking out of a modern, steel framed window at a London skyline she recognised. Smoke curled from several of the buildings, reflected firelight danced across window panes; from somewhere far below the blue lights of emergency vehicles stained the white skyscraper walls.

 

‘Where’s the restaurant?’ she called back, already sure of the answer.

 

‘No restaurant. This is just the end of the universe. The TARDIS has brought us to the epicentre of the energy spikes – this is where it all starts, this is the rip in reality. And she’s switched herself off so I can’t escape. We’re stuck here until the end of time, which looks like it might be about twenty minutes.’

 

Rose fiddled with one of the enormous levers and it moved easily under her touch, but the drawing called her back. She approached it step by slow step. From a distance it looked a lot like the Cyberman pencilled on Chloe Webber’s wardrobe but the closer she got the more differences she noticed.

 

‘There’s something here,’ she said, but she was talking to herself rather than him. ‘It’s taller than me but I don’t think it’s a robot. There are no bars on the sides of its head. And it looks like it’s wearing a coat, a long coat, and trousers I think.’

 

She reached out a hand towards the image. It had that strange mixture of sharp and ill-defined that the traced Cyberman had had, but it didn’t seem to be moving. Rather, from the outline of the face, the nose, chin and the roughly sketched hairline, it resembled a man, standing with his ear to the wall, listening. She bent towards it, wondering what the man had possibly hoped to hear in the ruins of reality.

 

Then she heard her name, a whisper, less than a whisper, a syllable expelled on a sigh, and she realised with a jerk that it was coming from the other side of the wall. She moved closer, stretched out her hand, fingertips centimetres, then millimetres away from making contact. Then she touched it.

 

She heard her name again, but it was a shout this time. ‘Rose. Get away from the wall.’

 

She tried to snatch her hand back, but there was a wind in her ears, a wind that whipped her hair into her eyes, a wind so strong she lost her footing and fell forward. Running footsteps were coming full pelt towards her and a voice, an achingly familiar voice, said three words with an edge of pain so raw it brought tears to her eyes.

 

‘I remember,’ she tried to reply, but the wind had her now and she couldn’t even look round.

 

She fell into the void.   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer are available on Amazon, should you be interested.


	21. Chapter 21

And was caught.

Her eyes were too blurry for her to see who was responsible for the catching, and before she was able to blink them clear she found herself pressed into a tight embrace.

‘Rose,’ an unfamiliar voice breathed into her ear, and without thinking too hard about it, she relaxed, something about the man and the hug reassuring, comforting. ‘Rose. My Rose.’

She stiffened at that. There was only one man who was allowed to call her his and it wasn’t this cockney stranger. She struggled in his arms, attempted to break free but he was clinging to her as if his life depended on it. She wrestled an arm out, reared back and swung it at his face as hard as she could.

He recoiled immediately, putting a hand to his cheek. ‘Ouch,’ he complained. ‘You hit harder than your mother.’

She squinted, rubbed her eyes and took a good look at her would-be rescuer. He was tall and skinny, clad in a brown suit with hair so artfully coiffured he must have put real effort into it, his brown eyes the colour of runny chocolate. She’d never met him before in her life.

‘How do you know my name?’

He gaped at her. ‘Rose? Are you feeling alright?’

She ignored him, scanning the room quickly for a way out. It appeared to be the mirror image of the one she’d just left, all white walls and levers, except that this one didn’t have a broken TARDIS in it, and no Doctor. A jagged lump caught in her throat and she forgot about the man, spinning on her heel to pat the wall behind her, searching for the doorway that had just sucked her through. Her fingers met nothing but concrete. She spread her hands, ran them over the surface more carefully, looking for a break, a seal, an edge that could be prised open.

‘What’s on the other side of this?’ she demanded, mirroring the stranger’s previous pose and putting her ear against the plaster to see if any sound might be able to travel through. There was a sound, but it wasn’t quite what she was expecting.

The whine of the sonic screwdriver cut the air and she whirled, her mouth dropping open. The man was pointing it at her and it took her a few seconds to recover herself, before she ran at him, snatched the device away and thrust it behind her back. ‘Where is he?’ she yelled. ‘What have you done with him?’

‘Ah.’ The man snapped his bony jaw shut. ‘You’re not my Rose, are you? You look like her, but,’ he waved vaguely. ‘Different hair. Different clothes. And when I say ‘my’ Rose, what I actually mean is not my Rose, obviously. There’s no ‘me and Rose’ or anything.’

She advanced on him threateningly. ‘You’re not making sense. What have you done to the Doctor?’

He brightened considerably. ‘Nothing. I am the Doctor.’

She hit him round the face again, as hard as she could.

He winced away, clutching at his cheek. ‘Stop doing that. I am the Doctor. You’re Rose Tyler. Your mother is Jackie, your dad is Pete. He’s dead. Or he’s in a parallel world. Which is it?’

She squinted at him. ‘What’s a parallel world?’

‘Narrows it down,’ he said. ‘What’s the last thing you remember before you came through void?’

‘The Doctor told me he loved me.’

‘Not something I would say,’ he mused. ‘Not now anyway. The Doctor you know, does he wear a lot of leather? Smell like petrol?’

She shrugged. ‘He had a shower this morning. The smell’s mostly gone.’

The thin man smiled winningly. ‘That was me before I regenerated. Time Lords don’t die, you see, we just change into someone else. He becomes me.’ He beamed at her. ‘Bigger and better in every way.’

She put her hands on her hips. ‘If you’re the Doctor, then where’s the TARDIS?’

‘Parked it downstairs. Do you want to come and check?’

‘No.’ Rose frowned. ‘Show me the psychic paper.’

He fished it out, handed it over, and it did indeed say ‘the Doctor’ on it, probably for the first time ever.

She turned away. ‘I have to get back. Reality’s about to implode and I need to be with him when it does.’

The man in the suit snorted. ‘Implode? Who told you that?’

‘He did. You did. Whatever. The timeline is collapsing like a concertina and Cybermen are falling through where it touches. The whole thing is going to go boom.’ She did the action. ‘And it will take my Doctor with it when it does.’

The man who might be the Doctor scratched his chin. ‘Did your Doctor happen to mention why this was happening?’ His hand copied the movement she’d made. ‘Although you realise that’s an explosion, not an implosion. An implosion would be more like this.’ He made some kind of complicated manoeuvre with his fingers which ended up with them curled into a ball, accompanying it with a sucking noise.

She gave him a level stare. ‘Concentrate. It’s happening because my Doctor used his TARDIS to create a fixed point in time so that he could come back and save me.’

‘Well, that was stupid of him. What did you need saving from?’

‘A French woman, apparently. Some ‘brain dead idiot’, I think was the expression, left me behind on a spaceship to run off with her. I tried to use emergency programme one and ended up stuck in the past.’

The brown man looked dreamy, and not in a good way. ‘Ah, Reinette. Lovely girl.’

Rose drew back her arm in preparation for a third slap, and the first one that he actually deserved, but he spotted the movement and dodged away.

‘And anyway, I didn’t leave you. I came back.’

Rose frowned. ‘You didn’t. He did.’

‘I mean, I came back for my Rose. She’s just fallen through the void into Pete’s world and I can’t get her back, but now I have you instead.’

‘There’s another one of me somewhere? The same way there’s another one of you?’

‘You’re from a parallel world, by the sound of it. There’s probably a lot of us both, by now.’ He was still maintaining a safe distance. ‘Lots of different parallel worlds, all existing at the same time, and never crossing over, expect where someone does something stupid, like here, and bodges great big holes from one to the other. Things fall through. Cybermen mostly, in this case. Some Daleks. And you.’

‘Just holes,’ she clarified. ‘Holes that things can fall through. Not great big explosions and the end of time, like he said?’

He grinned at her. ‘You don’t want to believe everything I tell you, you know. Even I’m wrong sometimes.’

‘Are you wrong about this? You’ve had Cybermen and Daleks and people falling through these holes, but in my world there’ve only been Cybermen helmets. No Daleks or anything.’

He shrugged. ‘You’re further away. Smaller holes I expect. Mini holes maybe. Holettes. Oh, I like that. Holettes.’

She turned back to the wall, feeling around the base now. ‘Then all I have to do is find a hole and crawl back through it, right? And we’ll be together and no one will die.’

‘In theory,’ confirmed the man whose opinion she was now willing to trust implicitly. ‘But in practice I’ve just shut them all down. No more cracks in time. No more travelling to parallel dimensions. This was the weak spot, the place where all the doorways were coming from and now it’s closed there isn’t any way back. You were the last thing to come through, I’m afraid.’

She rose to her feet, her eyes round as she stared at him in disbelief. ‘But I want to go back.’

He shrugged. ‘There isn’t any going back. Life doesn’t have a rewind button. You’re supposed to be here with me, not stuck with him.’

Her eyes filmed over for a second, before she blinked them clear, the anger rising inside her. ‘He came back for me. I’m not leaving him behind. You reckon you’re the Doctor. What’s the plan? The Doctor always has a plan.’

‘Speaking as the Doctor, I can categorically say that he doesn’t. I don’t. What I mostly have is hope that something will turn up, it usually does. ‘

She threw the sonic screwdriver back to him. ‘Yeah well, in this case, I’m going to turn up. Can you scan for another of those weak spots? Maybe they haven’t all shut down.’

He sighed, pocketed the screwdriver instead. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late. The cracks in this world are all gone.’ He stepped forward, a trifle cautiously, put a hand on each of her shoulders and rubbed them. ‘But I’m still here, and we’re together. I look a bit different, but I’m still the same person. I feel the same way about you that he does. You’re the most important woman in the world to me.’

She shook him off. ‘You left me for five and a half hours. You don’t feel the same way he does.’ She reached out then and cupped his cheek, ran a thumb across his skin, smiled at his confused look. ‘But you are the Doctor, and that is a fantastic plan. I love you.’

His confusion deepened. ‘Quite right too,’ he muttered, offhand. ‘What plan?’

She broke the contact, whirled, and ran for the exit. The last thing she heard was the Doctor murmuring ‘Unless…’

The lift was already on the top floor so Rose jumped straight in, hammering on the buttons impatiently until it began descending. She had no idea whether or not time passed differently in different worlds and nor did she know whether a house on one side correlated with the same house on the other, but this was the only plan she had and she was going to try it, no matter what. The tube wasn’t running, what with all the invasions that had been happening, but she managed to hail a black cab loitering just outside the police cordon and gave the driver directions to the residence of the actual most important woman in the world, Mickey’s gran.

Only one thing apart from the Cybermen helmets had ever been out of place, and that was a living, breathing, human being who had fallen through a gran sized hole in a parallel world and ended up alive when she should be dead. Rose crossed her fingers, wished upon a star, clutched her four-leaved clover, rabbit’s foot, black cat and anything else that might be lucky and just hoped that the universe would be kind enough to let her get back where she belonged.

Mickey’s gran’s house wasn’t locked, the front door was still on the latch, but it smelt faintly of mould when she pushed her way in a few minutes later. There was a half-drunk cup of tea on the kitchen counter, cold, with a thick white skin on top and all the fruit in the bowl was soft and brown. Somewhere upstairs a radio was playing. Rose worked her way around the tiny lounge, examining the walls for shiny white patches, feeling for soft spots that might hide a way through. She drew a blank in the dining room, and then worked her way up the stairs, noting the rip in the swirling carpet and stepping carefully over it.

The avocado coloured bathroom suite and orange tiles held no gateways to another reality, and Mickey’s gran’s bedroom, complete with walking aid, bunch of wilted flowers and false teeth in a glass yielded no clue. The second bedroom was full of a lifetime’s worth of junk, packing crates, suitcases and a huge white wedding dress in a plastic wrapper. Rose went through it all carefully, poking into every corner, waiting to feel the inexorable tug of the interdimensional time travelling wind, but her feet stayed firmly on the ground.

She snivelled a bit, wiped her nose, brushed off a traitorous tear, and sat down on the top step to consider her options. That was when she heard it. A whisper in the shadows. A rustle, a half-heard footstep. And a voice. A voice that spoke across long miles of emptiness to echo in the solitude of her heart. A voice she’d wait all her life to hear. A voice that sounded very, very bored.

It took her a while to spot it, a wrinkle in the air, a slight mismatch in the pattern of the carpet about halfway down the stairs, a shimmer, a faint glow. She must have walked straight through it on the way up. She crept slowly towards the ripple, unwilling to risk a fall, knowing that this staircase had proved fatal, once upon a time. The gap between universes was about waist height, not something that you’d step into by accident – if Rose wanted to push through it, she was going to have to jump. She assumed that Mickey’s gran had been halfway through falling to her death when she’d fallen into another world instead. Rose didn’t dare get too close, knowing that the holes into her own reality were small, small enough to fit only a helmet and nothing more, apart from this one. She didn’t want to poke her head through and find she’d lost it.

Instead, she called his name.

‘You took your time,’ he complained immediately, scratchy and hoarse with distance, or possibly relief. She couldn’t see him, but she could imagine the scowl on his face, the twinkle in his eyes that meant he was teasing.    
  
She shrugged. 'How long did you wait?’  
  
‘Five and a half...’ he started, then trailed off. ‘Forever,’ he said. ‘It felt like forever.’  
  
She pulled her arms tighter around herself. ‘I can’t see you.’

‘I can see you, sort of. You’re all flickery and faint though. And it looks like you’ve lost your legs.’

She stood up a bit straighter. ‘Do I look like a hologram?’

‘Not a very good one. The gap between worlds must be quite small. Don’t step through it yet, I’ll try to use the TARDIS to make it bigger.’

‘This is emergency programme one,’ she said.

‘Hilarious. Really funny. I’m splitting my sides with laughter over here.’

‘Doctor, now listen. If this programme is activated it means I’m stuck in a parallel dimension with no way back, and that’s alright, at least reality isn’t collapsing like a concertina and taking you with it.’

‘It was premature interpretation, that’s all. It can happen to anyone. I was too busy concentrating on not losing you again to think of another explanation for the energy readings. And honestly, who would have thought the most plausible explanation was a load of helmets falling through from a parallel world being invaded by Cybermen?’

‘I bet you’re fussing and moaning right now. Typical. But just be quiet, and listen a bit more. The TARDIS is your best friend. If I can’t get back, you’ll need her more than ever. I want you to make things right with her, apologise, if you have to.’

‘Already done. She switched herself back on once the ruptures in reality started closing and it became obvious that our timeline wasn’t going anywhere. We’re parked at the bottom of the stairs, and she’s helping me talk to you right now, on condition that I remove her manual override switch. This gateway only operates in one direction, I can’t get through to you, I’ve already tried, so the TARDIS has burnt up nearly all her power supplies keeping the gap open long enough for you to get here. We’ve got about two minutes left.’

‘And if you want to remember me, you can do one thing.’

‘Look at the enormous love bite you left on my shoulder? I’m nearly up to full power. When I say so, you jump. I’ll catch you.’

‘Just one. Move on. I don’t want you moping around feeling sorry for yourself. Get out there and save the world. Don’t be on your own.’

‘I love you,’ he snapped, a touch of steel in his voice now. ‘What do you think that means?’

She shrugged, twisting the ring around her finger.

‘It means I won’t move on and I won’t leave you behind. It means that if you jump through that gap and you don’t end up in my arms I’ll come looking for you. I’ll look for you for the rest of my life, and that’s going to be a really long time. But if you jump through that gap and you do end up in my arms then I’ll never let you out of them again. You’ll need another few boxes of tissues, at the very least. Are you ready? You need to jump.’

But she hesitated. If she jumped off the top step and ended up dead, like Mickey’s gran, not even the Doctor would be able to find her. And like the other Doctor had said, there were probably hundreds of parallel worlds out there, and no guarantee she’d end up in the right one.

‘Rose,’ he said, threads of tenderness woven through his tone. ‘I know you’re scared, but you have to hope it will be alright. No one can live without hope. And you know who taught me that? You did. That first day we met. You held my hand and I realised that life could get better again, as long as I held on to hope. You’re my hope. Jump.’

She took a deep breath, stepped back a few paces.

His voice drifted out of the empty space between worlds. ‘Remember that I love you.’

‘I remember,’ she answered, and jumped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That is the end of the story, one which it has taken me years to come to. Thank you for helping me slay my demons.
> 
> If you'd like to read more of my work try The Car Crash Bride and The Postman's Daughter by Sally Anne Palmer available now on Amazon, or contact me on sallyannepalmerauthor at outlook dot com.


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